Bloodlines
by Drucilla
Summary: Syra thought she had a hard legacy to live up to before. But when her past comes back to haunt her and people thought long lost are found again, she must prove that she really is her father's daughter. Completed.
1. Prologue

Author's Note: Okay, there was supposed to be an author's note, but I forgot what it was going to be. Oh well, can't have been too important. Standard disclaimer, yes Tem Morrison is very hot, Virtual Bettie (I think that was you), thank you to all my loyal readers, and on with the show!  
  
  
  
She was supposed to be better than this.  
  
Cassandra hadn't been running long. Long enough, she thought, to lead the pursuers away from the Slave II, or at least some of them. There were obviously those who found Boba Fett a more tantalizing prize than... whatever they thought she was. She locked in evasive techniques for the next five minutes or so and went to join Kashya at the guns.  
  
"What've we got?" she asked tersely as she swung up into the gunner array. Pulling down the headset over her face, she grabbed the guns and started returning fire.  
  
"Too damn many," Kashya growled more out of anxiety than anger. "Even for us." Even for him, they both thought. TIE fighters were converging on them all like flies on a carcass, which was going to be an all-too-apt analogy if they didn't manage to make it out of there alive. It took time to plot in a course, and they'd had a rare moment of being caught flatfooted, so time was something they didn't have very much of. If Cassandra could keep the Imps off of them for a few minutes Fett could plot in a course and feed her the coordinates, enabling them both to get out of there. But there were too many of them, and they were swarming like mynocks.  
  
And to make matters worse, 6-year-old Syra was strapped in the cockpit of the Slave II.  
  
"We've got to buy more time... why the hell are they after us anyway?" Kashya wanted to know. She sounded panicked, and Cassandra couldn't really blame her. Unfortunately her mother had been associating with Boba Fett long enough for some of his trademark stoicism to rub off.  
  
"We can deal with that after we've gotten back. Focus, Kashya." Cassandra's guns vaped another two imps. "Focus."  
  
"Yeah, yeah," Kashya grumbled, sweat dripping into her eyes and obscuring her vision.  
  
Not for the first time, Cassandra wished she'd had more time at the Jedi schools, learning the use of her Force powers. Despite that she'd never heard of them used in such a way before, she was certain that if she'd stayed longer, learned more, that she could find a way out of this. As it was her skill with machines was no use to her if she wasn't in reasonable proximity to them, and her only other real talent was with the lightsaber.  
  
"Disengaging." Fett's voice, a deeply welcome and comforting presence to her (even if to no one else in the entire known universe), sounded in her ear.  
  
"Just get me those coordinates," she told him. "We'll handle things here." Privately she doubted her ability to handle this many ships, but it wouldn't have done any good to tell him. In her view-screen she saw Slave II back off, vaping a couple more Imps as they tried to get in his way. She felt her younger daughter's presence in her mind, a little ball of excitement. To her, this was only Daddy doing what he did best: flying and shooting. Cassandra smiled slightly; oh to be young again.  
  
A stray bolt hit the ship, rocking them abruptly and knocking Cassandra's head against the viewport. Blood in her mouth matched the smell of blood on her forehead, and her vision reeled for a second. "Kashya, talk to me..."  
  
"We've got hull breach. Atmosphere venting... I'm sending Domitian to lock it down..." In the background Cassandra could hear the R2 unit bleeping to the rescue.  
  
"Hang on, Kashya... just a few more minutes." Cassandra sent laser fire after another Imp, silently urging Fett to transmit faster. She looked up, startled, and tried to clear the blood from her eyes as a familiar ship silhouette began to creep into view. "Hey... what's a St..."  
  
The second explosion knocked her mercifully unconscious.  
  
Boba Fett watched the Harrier explode with an intensely blank expression. Two other Imperial fighters were caught in the explosion, but what concerned him was the conspicuous lack of anything resembling an intact escape pod. He scanned the debris, scanned it again, scanned it a third time. He blatantly ignored the Star Destroyer lurking overhead. He filed the rapid retreat of the Imperial fighters away in his mind for future contemplation. And he scanned the debris for life-signs, against all expectation and probability.  
  
The debris was as dead as empty, cold space.  
  
Boba Fett sat back and ignored the attempts of the Imperials to hail the ship. He reached beside him and picked up his helmet, staring into the t-shaped visor that so many were afraid of. He wondered, clinically, if there was anything he could have done. But then, Cassandra had survived the impossible before... she had survived him. Something that few others had done, not with as close a call as she had. Plenty had escaped from their captors after he'd held them. Few had escaped from him after he had captured them. None with as little fuss as her. She would survive.  
  
"Daddy...?" Syra was staring at the front transparisteel viewscreen with wide eyes. "Daddy, where's Mommy?"  
  
The bounty hunter stared at the girl with slowly dawning comprehension. It wasn't over yet, hadn't been over anyway, but the Force- sensitive daughter could no longer sense the Force-sensitive mother. He had hunted the Jedi before. He knew what that meant.  
  
"Daddy?" Syra's wide golden eyes turned to Fett. He thought briefly of a day, decades ago, hot in the red planet's sun. A grand gladiatorial event where the outcome was supposed to be decided. A day that was supposed to be a celebration of a job well done.  
  
An empty helmet lying on the sand.  
  
"Mommy's... gone," he said quietly, calling to memory the time Jango had had to tell him of Zam's death. "She's gone." More to himself than to his daughter.  
  
Syra's head whipped back and forth between staring at the debris floating in space and her father, her mother's eyes wide in her mother's face. Boba Fett simply stared straight ahead, hands still on the controls. His mind was still on a far away planet, a long time ago. He looked to the side again at the helmet, watching Syra pick it up in an uncanny imitation of ...  
  
Syra looked at her father and put the helmet down.  
  
Boba Fett's mind cleared with the gesture. It wasn't, after all, as bad as his own situation had been. Syra wasn't alone, even though she had lost her mother. It was just her and him now... and after all, that wasn't too terrible a thing. He had survived a childhood alone with his father. It was simply his job now to make sure that Syra was never totally alone. Ever.  
  
The bounty hunter circled the debris one last time, briefly registering the fact that there were no longer Imperials in the area, making a mental note to figure out what the hell had happened later. For now, he needed to get his daughter home. 


	2. Chapter One

"'Nara! Incoming comm!" Tenel Ka's voice echoed down the hallway and into the room of the young girl who now lived at the Jedi Academy.   
  
Linnara poked her head out of her room. "From who?? I don't get mail, much less…"   
  
"I think it's your father…" Tenel Ka grinned as Linnara dashed out of door and started pounding down the hallway past her fellow student. Of all of them, even despite that some of the Jedi students didn't have families and most of them had few friends outside of the ones at the new-founded Academy, Linnara got the fewest calls. Her father, seemingly the only one who knew she was here, called her infrequently and randomly. Then again, Tenel Ka thought, that was probably to be expected. He probably wasn't free and in the area for long enough to have a decent conversation very often. He clearly missed his daughter, and she just as clearly missed him too.  
  
"Thanks!" Linnara called over her shoulder on the way to the small room that held the public comms. She slid the privacy shield down but didn't darken it. Tenel Ka walked on down the hallway, used to Linnara's reclusive behavior by now, at least where it came to her father. After all, some of the Academy's best students were children of former smugglers.  
  
"Dad?"  
  
The screen flickered, and then the image consolidated itself into a care-worn, slightly scarred older man who resembled the young Jedi Apprentice in coloring only. "Hello, preciosa," he gave her one of his rare smiles, and Linnara frowned inside. He must be feeling tired. "How are things?"  
  
"How's things with you? You look like shit," 'Nara replied acerbically, not wasting time on the niceties.  
  
"Is that any way to talk to your old man?" The self-appointed trader arched a wry eyebrow. "Things could be better. But they're going the same as always, nothing for you to worry about." There was an ever so slight accent on 'you,' an unspoken admonition to her not to go chasing off after her father. Neither of them would have put it past her to think about it. Such things ran in the blood.   
  
"I wasn't worrying." Her response was a little too quick, but to his satisfaction it was followed up with, "and I'm not going anywhere. I'd get half the Academy on my tail if I did."  
  
"How are you doing there?" he asked, as he always did. "I know it must be tough, with your background so different from everyone else's there…"   
  
"I'm fine, Dad," she replied with fond exasperation, as she always did. "You worry too much, you know that? It's not good for you, especially with your blood pressure. You'll kick off early, and then where will I be, hmm?"   
  
Her father made a derisive noise. "You'll do fine on your own. I did more with less at your age, and so did your mother. Survival is in your bloodline, you know that."   
  
It was. Each of them knew they were only worrying about the other out of habit. Granted, it was a habit that was formed under circumstances very conducive to worry. Neither of them led what might remotely be called a quiet lifestyle. But when 'Nara had entered the Jedi Academy they had made a deal: he'd settle down if she would, at least until she was out of the Academy. Then they could go around and raise hell all over the universe together.   
  
"And if I didn't you'd remind me every other call, like you always do. Honestly, Dad, you'd think I was under some sort of secret threat, the way you keep going on about it. I'm fine, we're all fine here, Master Skywalker won't let anything happen to us."  
  
"Huh." Antilles's mouth made that not-quite-scowl that it always did whenever Linnara brought up Master Skywalker. "You know what I think of the man."  
  
"I do," she replied warningly. "All of it. You're the one who suggested I go here. You practically sent me here since, you said it yourself, there are things you can't really teach me. So don't start getting all high-and-mighty on me now, Mister. I'm learning good stuff here, even you would find it useful."  
  
"I highly doubt that." Irony sizzled through his words. "Well, as long as you're all right."  
  
"I'm fine." There was a slight pause. "How's …"  
  
The man sighed heavily. "She's all right. She still won't talk to me, but I keep checking up on her. For your sake, so don't go getting any ideas."  
  
Linnara ignored that. "After … how many years has it been? Eight? Nine?"  
  
"Nine years in two months, exactly."  
  
They were both quiet for a bit. "You'd think she'd give over eventually," Linnara said finally. "It's not like staying angry with you is going to change anything. And it's not like it makes her special or something… I don't know what she's thinking."  
  
"She's not," Antilles said, "People don't, when it comes down to it."  
  
"Except us."  
  
"We're the exception to a lot of rules, preciosa. You know that by now."  
  
"Ye-e-e-e-es…" Linnara smiled slightly. "Most of them rules laid down by you, yourself."  
  
He shrugged. "Circumstances change."  
  
"Uh-huh." She took a closer look at her father. He really did look… more tired, older. He'd never looked old, or at least never looked as though he'd gotten older. He'd somehow seemed to stay the same, despite the years and the rigors his line of work took him through. "Dad, are you sure you're okay? You look like something the Sa… sandworm ate," she stopped herself in time. Careless words, she chided herself, could get them both discovered. Wouldn't do to be careless.  
  
"Ha. Ha. Very ha."  
  
"I'm serious. Mostly."  
  
"I'm fine. Quit worrying," he retorted gruffly. Something beeped in the background, and he looked off-screen for a second. "I have to go. The merchandise just came in."  
  
Merchandise. She knew what that meant. Linnara shook her head. "You take care of yourself. Don't leave me stranded here with these people," she smiled. "They're far too uptight for me to stay with for long."  
  
He smiled a little. "You take care of yourself too."  
  
"I love you too, Dad."  
  
He still managed to sign off just barely ahead of her. Linnara sighed and banged her head softly on the comm console. One of these days, as much as he'd lightened up, he was going to unbend enough to actually say the 'l' word. She knew older students here at the Academy, boys going through the usual teenage discovery of girls, who were less pa1ranoid about saying it than her father. Not that it was really unusual or even unexpected, but…   
  
The knock on the privacy shield made her jump. She looked up, hoping she didn't look as guilty as she felt, to meet the eyes of Jacen and Jaina Solo. Then she started hoping she didn't look as amused as she felt; if they'd come two seconds earlier, she would have had to fight to keep from laughing. As it was she was trying not to giggle, thinking of the expression on her father's face if he actually saw who she spent most of her time with. He'd've had a whole herd of bantha. Linnara raised the privacy shield and ducked out of the booth.  
  
"Wedge just put in another appearance.... and he brought some fighters with him! We're going to try some simulator runs, want to come?" Jaina's eyes were practically gleaming with excitement, and she was jigging from one foot to the other like a small child who needed to go to the bathroom. She was always anxious to try her hand against the fabled Rogue and Wraith squadrons.  
  
"If I say no, will you explode?" Linnara grinned. Of the students at the Academy, she was one of the few who could give Jaina a run for her money. She ascribed her piloting talents to her father letting her have one too many turns at the helm. Master Luke just smiled and said that piloting was in her blood. This always made her go quiet; if they'd known just how much in her blood it really was, she'd be in a lot of trouble.  
  
"Aw, c'mon. It's got to be better than talking to a blank viewscreen all day." Jaina, having never, ever seen Linnara's father, was firmly of the opinion that he didn't exist, and teased 'Nara about it often. Even Master Skywalker was curious as to why the man never managed to make it to Yavin, but Linnara's childhood as a trader brat on the Outer Rim made it reasonably clear. He occasionally expressed a wistful desire to meet her father, but she usually managed to plead off.  
  
"One day, my dad is going to make it here, and then you'll be sorry." Linnara made a face at Jaina, silently praying that her dad never found a reason to make it over to the Academy.  
  
"Uh-huh. I'd bet my dad can beat up your dad any day of the week."  
  
Linnara smothered a giggle. "Maybe. But my dad can outfly your dad any day of the week."  
  
Jaina made a face at the other girl. "Pity those skills skipped a generation."  
  
'Nara smiled. If only Jaina knew whose skills she had inherited. But it was about time for a rematch anyway, especially with Rogue or Wraith squadrons to play with. "Watch me."  
  
  
  
  
  
Closer to Yavin than anyone would have guessed, a bounty hunter turned off his comm unit and closed his eyes. Maybe he really was getting too old for this (or maybe not), but his daughter's enthusiasm and passion was going to exhaust him into the ground, and possibly sooner rather than later. It didn't help that the impish gleam in her eyes reminded him of her mother, and her quick retorts in her mother's voice were like a blaster bolt to the gut even now. Not for the first time, he felt a surge of guilty relief for having sent her off to the Jedi Academy, not just for training, but also for distance from the constant pain-filled reminder.  
  
Boba Fett sighed heavily, donning his helmet and his trademark stoicism in the same gesture. He hadn't been making excuses when he had mentioned merchandise to be picked up, but even if the soon-to-be-Bantha-fodder accountant hadn't existed he would probably have found an excuse to sign off soon anyway. Syra… Linnara, he reminded himself, she's Linnara now… reminded him too much of her mother, and he couldn't afford that kind of sentimentality when the object of it wasn't around to be put at a distance. As often as he had visited her home planet Ceneth and as much of a haven as it (and she) had become, there had always been a tangibility to her presence, an almost comforting solidness that he could put aside at all times except when space became too cold and unforgiving. It was as if when she was alive, she had been that much easier to set aside, knowing that she was there and waiting for his next return trip.  
  
That tangibility was gone now, replaced with the sentimentality of memories that were much harder to put away. Memories of her, in flying and in fighting and even in the perfect calm he'd come to associate with her home. Memories of how she, of all people, seemed to understand him the best of everyone who had ever tried to get at the mind beneath the helmet, and without even really trying or wanting. Sometimes actively not wanting, he remembered.  
  
"You're not that good, you know." She'd said once in a moment of brief, rare anger. "It's just that other people really are that stupid."  
  
"Of course," he shrugged, not really seeing where she was going with this and starting not to care, either. He didn't know why he'd started to care in the first place, except that it had started out as an argument about Kashya, and their highly dubious status as a family.  
  
"You're not as clever as you think you are, either," she'd said ominously.  
  
"Which means what?"  
  
"If you'd remembered what happened the last time we got into a … fight… like the last one…" she'd continued, and then it suddenly all clicked. "You'd remember what happened afterwards, too."  
  
The bounty hunter was caught flat-footed, the instances of which he could count on one hand with fingers left over. It all clicked, Kashya's half-ecstatic, half-enraged greeting, Romy's increased suspicion, Cassandra's own erratic behavior. "What …."  
  
"Congradulations. Dad. Again."  
  
The bounty hunter smiled slightly, remembering what had come next. At the time he hadn't been sure whether to be pleased or angry about the whole thing (which, granted, could only be ascribed to their negligence). Seeing Syra grow up, though, and turn into someone as skilled as her father and as talented as her mother… seeing her bright ambition shining in the way she smiled, the way she wore her own set of customized armor, the way she flew... seeing her carry on his inadvertent legacy, the legacy of the name of Fett. That was worth it all. At the time, though…  
  
"Great," he muttered, taking refuge in sarcasm from the usdden surge of uncharacteristic panic."Another body to guard and not get paid for it."  
  
Cassandra whacked him in the arm, not an open-palm girl-like slap but a punch with a good portion of her strength behind it. "Bastard. If we're all such a burden, then just fly off like you always do and don't come back this time." It was similar to what she'd said on previous occasions, only it sounded like this time she meant it. He held up his hands and backed up, startled at her vehemence and even more so by the strength of his reaction.  
  
"Do you see me going anywhere?"  
  
Cassandra watched him, golden eyes ablaze, for the longest time. He stayed exactly where he was, unmoving. If his hunter's sense hadn't told him that one wrong move could get him killed, common sense and the look in her eyes probably would have. "Good," she said eventually…  
  
The bounty hunter shook his head slowly. Dealing with pregnant females was not on his list of skills, and he had been glad for the jobs that took him away for a year at a time. When he'd finally returned to Ceneth, though, Cassandra had been waiting for him, as perfectly in control as ever and with baby Syra in her arms. It had been the first time they'd had any reason to talk without the usual dancing around the subject and making sure they weren't going to gun each other down. It had been the first time he'd let anyone into his life since Jango, even with the revelation of Kashya's existence. Most of the barriers between him and Cassandra had dissipated, somehow, that visit.   
  
Boba Fett shook off the memories of the past with a half-disgusted shake of his head. That kind of sentimentality was useless, and it was going to get him killed if he wasn't careful. The accountant, a shifty sort of Twi'lek, wasn't the usual sort of challenge he liked, but the bounty posted on him by the Admiral Pellaeon was more than enough to make up for it. On the other hand, any other bounty hunters after this particular prize might very well kill him for the credits. And some of the other bounty hunters were very nearly as skilled as he was. He hadn't lived as long as he had by being careless.  
  
The small Headhunter the Twi'lek had commandeered was easily disabled by a few laser shots to the engines. The docking clamp was locked on without much trouble, either. Fett descended the ladder and quickly boarded the other ship, blaster out and ready in case someone had heard he was coming after the Twi'lek and decided he was worth waiting for. But the Twi'lek, much to the bounty hunter's distaste, was cringing, alone, in a corner with twitching head-tails. At least this species wasn't given to soiling itself in fright. He advanced on the merchandise, anticipating no real resistance.  
  
The comm unit switched on abruptly, causing Fett to spin around with blaster rifle drawn and the Twi'lek to cringe even further under a console. After a few seconds he realized it must have been a recorded message, triggered to activate upon boarding after confirmation of the Slave II's transponder beacon. Which meant that someone had been anticipating his arrival. He didn't like being anticipated, even less so when it was done successfully. Most likely someone had been using the Twi'lek as bait. He started prepping his ship for a quick retreat, voice activated from inside his helmet. But his curiosity forced him to read the message even as he grabbed the Twi'lek by the arm.  
  
"Boba Fett. I presume you've apprehended poor Bakkah by now. While I would appreciate having him returned to me the point of this exercise, as I presume you'll have figured out by now, was to impart certain information to you concerning the safety of your daughter."  
  
Fett's hand clenched involuntarily on the blaster rifle. His other hand clenched on the Twi'lek's arm, and the creature squeaked.  
  
"After turning over Bakkah you are to proceed to the planet at these coordinates for further instructions. I am given to understand that you are familiar with the place." Cenath's location appeared on the astro-navigation console. "I expect to see you there."   
  
The recording ended. The bounty hunter's hands tightened and flexed on the blaster rifle as though he could feel the speaker's throat underneath his hands. A few moments later he stopped, the storm apparently over. But when the visored gaze turned on the Twi'lek, the creature fainted dead away from the intensity of the leashed violence contained within.   
  
There was no reason in the universe that anyone should have known about Ceneth, or that he sometimes maintained a home there. There was even less reason why anyone should have known about his daughter. That someone should have known about both, and used them to try to manipulate him into doing their dirty work (because that was all this was, he was sure)... that was intolerable. It would have been intolerable for Jango, and it was even more intolerable now. He smothered the brief flash of guilt at the memory, and the knowledge that it never actually had happened to Jango. It didn't matter. Someone had threatened his daughter. Someone was going to die.  
  
Fett would turn in the Twi'lek, collect the bounty, and visit the small, peaceful planet he hadn't seen in nearly nine years. And then he would see about the safety of his daughter in his own inimitable way. 


	3. Chapter Two

"So, when do you think we'll get to fly for real?" Jaina wondered. She, Tenel Ka, and the girl who called herself Linnara were having a rough equivalent of a slumber party, inasmuch as they could with only three participants. Linnara rolled over onto her back and put hands and feet in the air, wiggling fingers and toes with the fascination of the very sleepy.   
  
"Speak for yourself," she mumbled absently.   
  
"Fly with Rogue Squadron, I mean," Jaina bopped her friend on the head with a pillow, and 'Nara made an 'ackpth' noise. "When do you think Master Luke and Wedge will let us?"  
  
"I'd rather have my own ship," Linnara flopped sideways, not really thinking about what she was saying. "Maybe a light cruiser. Something fast, sleek… something like my father's ship, maybe." At least she had the presence of mind not to go into detail on what kind of weapons systems she wanted.  
  
Tenel Ka flopped over as well, staring nose to nose with Linnara. "Speaking of your father, how's he doing? And when's he going to visit the Academy?"  
  
'Nara snapped awake, although she was careful to give no sign of her alertness either in the Force or in her face. One of the best things she reckoned that Academy life had taught her was how to conceal her emotions in every sense. "Don't know. Whenever his business interests take him this way, I suppose. He's been really busy, and I don't think he's planning on retiring anytime soon, even though he really could any time he wanted to… he just wouldn't know what to do with himself if he did, though." She didn't bother concealing the smile that the thought brought to her face. Boba Fett, retiring. No one would believe it even if it was true.  
  
"What did he do before you came to the Academy? Didn't he used to take you with him?"  
  
Laser light and fire. Explosions. Her mother, always a comforting presence, suddenly gone.  
  
"Sometimes."  
  
Tenel Ka exchanged a look with Jaina that 'Nara barely caught, a look of sympathy and compassion. They reached out for each other's hands at the same time, shared a brief moment of bonding through the Force. Linnara held back, and the other two didn't ask why, presuming it was something to do with her mother. She'd never spoken much about the woman, but everyone at the Academy could sense the bond Linnara's family, or what remained of them, shared. The bond, and the gaping hurt that her mother's death had left.  
  
"So, what do you think of the new exercise Master Skywalker has planned?"  
  
Linnara opened her mouth to respond to the blatant change of subject, but there was a knock on the door. All three girls turned to the door, then exchanged a grin. "You speak, he appears." She opened the door. "Master Skywalker?"  
  
The Jed Master's face was grim. "Linnara, you're father's on the comm. I think it's urgent."  
  
All three girls looked up at him with varying expressions of trepidation and nervousness. Linnara endured a brief moment of panic before she realized that the grim expression on Master Skywalker's face was not, in fact, due to him having discovered a bounty hunter's daughter among his students. "Oh… um… thanks, Master Skywalker…" she said slowly, right before she pelted out of the room and down the hall so fast Jaina would have sworn she saw her uncle's robes flap.  
  
Linnara/Syra skidded to a halt in the comm room, taking several deep breaths as she paused on the threshold. She had to be extra careful here; she couldn't reveal the kind of nervousness she felt at an urgent call from her father. Granted, it was probably serious, and a little worry was perfectly reasonable… but a trader or even a smuggler encountered much different and much less dangers than a bounty hunter did. She calmed herself and walked over to the one comm unit that was lit, activating the privacy shield and darkening it just in case her father was suited up.  
  
"Dad?"  
  
"Syra…" In that moment, she was suddenly glad she'd gotten into the habit of the sound-proof privacy shield. "Something's happened. Something to do with the Imperials, I'm not sure what yet but I'm going to find out."  
  
When Boba Fett said he was going to find something out in that tone of voice, it was going to be found out, come Imps or inferno. Syra nodded. "Do you need backup? I could get out of here if you really needed me…" It sounded childish but she had to make the offer...  
  
Her father shook his head. "Stay there. You'll be safer there than you would with me." He looked at something away from the range of the camera, and suddenly Syra was afraid. She could feel him growing tense (he never got nervous, just tense) and watched him reach for what looked like his helmet. "Be careful, Syra. Something's happening, someone's taking more notice of me than either of us should like."  
  
"Who… who's taking notice of us?" she accentuated the 'us' ever so slightly. He hadn't specified that whoever it was knew about her, but she was going to assume it just in case. "Dad, what's going on?"  
  
"I don't know yet," he told her tersely, fiddling with something in his helmet. "It has something to do with Admiral Pellaeon…" He looked off-screen again, and in the midst of the flash of familiar consoles and comm units, suddenly Syra realized where he was. Cenath. Her mother's home.   
  
"Dad… why are you…"   
  
"Whatever you do, Syra, don't follow me. Don't try to track me. I think that's what they want. Remember what I taught you, preciosa, don't…" The screen began to fade. In the background she thought she heard someone saying 'We don't have time for this,' and then the screen went to static entirely.  
  
"Dad…" Cold fear clenched her heart; she drove it back. "Dad, talk to me. Don't have time for what?" She fiddled with buttons, increasing the power to the receivers and boosting the signal. "Dad… don't do this to me. You know better than to pull a stunt like this on me."  
  
"Dad… talk to me? What's going on? Why are you … who's with you?"  
  
"Dad? Please?"  
  
"Dad?"  
  
  
  
Syra pounded down the hallway to her room, all pretense and false identity gone in favor of hiding from all the Jedi and apprentices in the compound long enough to get packed and get out of there. Her time with the Jedi had been productively spent… well, productively enough… but now they were getting into exercises and philosophies that were designed to train her to become a Jedi, which was something she had no interest in becoming. She would be a bounty hunter like her father and as formidable as her father and, as useful as Master Skywalker was, he was still an inferior teacher when it came to achieving that goal. She'd been contemplating disappearing from the Academy for a while, and had been thinking and exchanging ideas with her father about how they could manage it. The conversation they'd just had only hastened her departure.   
  
She skidded into her room, disappearing into her closets and sending a flurry of bags flying out behind her. A few seconds later, jumpsuits and flightsuits started piling up on one of them. She had learned packing from her father, although it was more disorganized than he'd ever liked it. She'd learned efficiency from him, it just didn't look soldier-neat. But she had managed to get her departure preparation time to thirty minutes, which was good enough. Time and accuracy and haste was all that mattered. Getting out quickly with everything you needed to survive. It had been drilled into her.  
  
Her room was relatively bare of decoration. A few pictures of her father, one of the entire family when she had been very young, these were the only personal touches she kept out, primarily to alleviate questions as to why she didn't get close to anyone. The family picture and most of the pictures of her father were safe. The only people who knew what he looked like underneath the helmet were dead or not likely to be at the Jedi Academy, and no one would have expected Boba Fett to have a family. Linnara Antilles, on the other hand, definitely had a family before half of them had gone up in a fiery space explosion. So, the old family picture. Apart from her clothes, her books, and her lightsaber, though, there was little else. It all fit into two bags and a belt pouch. She looked around at the room she had occupied for the last nine years; there wasn't much to indicate that anyone had lived there at all.   
  
Well, that was the way it should be. That was the way her father had taught her to be, for both their sakes.   
  
Syra shouldered her bags and opened her mind, reaching out passively with her thoughts to find the locations of everyone in the compound. Most of the students were either asleep or otherwise engaged in nighttime activities… reading, sneaking a snack, talking. Master Skywalker and Mara Jade were talking, and they seemed worried. Possibly about her? It didn't matter. She scrawled a quick note for Master Skywalker, dropped it on her bed, and walked out of the compound.   
  
One of the first things her father had taught her, that her mother had started to, was how not to be seen. People, she had learned, even Jedi could be encouraged to ignore what seemed to them to be perfectly ordinary. She used the technique now, a quiet little voice in the back of everyone's minds that said 'It's okay, I'm supposed to be here, I'm supposed to do this. Don't worry.' In an Imperial base or on a Warlord's ship it might not have worked, but they were used to her presence. She made it out of the compound and a fair distance away before she stopped and set her packs down.  
  
"Tethys…" Syra raised the tiny commlink. She'd never had her mother's talent with machinery, an odd one among the Jedi. Apparently only Anakin had shared it. "Tethys, do you copy?"  
  
An irritable whirr-beep gave her the favorable answer.  
  
"It's time to go, Tethys. Bring the ship around, would you?"  
  
The droid beeped rudely again, but the commlink began to whirr with the sound of engines gearing up. Syra kept walking; she didn't want to risk the ship landing anywhere within sight or hearing of the compound, and some of the trainees had very long range eyes and ears. "Lock on to my signal, I'm heading further out," she told the droid as she walked. It blatted at her, something about the annoyance of having to deal with her changing her mind every five minutes. Syra smiled slightly. It hadn't been the same since … for a long time, but Tethys' temperament was starting to become reassuringly familiar.  
  
She'd barely gotten out of visual range of the compound before the old ship landed softly. The ramp descended, and she made her way up it almost before it had touched the ground. "Something's happened, Tethys," she told the droid as she made her way to the cockpit. "We need to get back to Ceneth. Something's happened to Dad."  
  
Tethys was actually quiet for a couple of minutes before text began to appear on the screen. "How do you know?"  
  
"I can feel it," Syra said wryly. "He's not …" Syra swallowed, thinking of the possibility of being all alone in the universe. "...not yet. But he's tense about something, worried, and the last communication I had from him was roughly an hour and a half ago, and it got cut off about the same time I started hearing blaster fire. Now, I don't know about you, but this doesn't add up to anything good, to me."  
  
"It does sound like trouble. What are you going to do?"  
  
"Well, Dad told me to stay away. So, naturally, I'm going to see if I can bail him out," Syra smiled crookedly, less humor and more self-deprecation.   
  
"That comes from your mother's side of the family," Tethys warbled. "None of you ever learned to leave well enough alone."  
  
"Well, from what I can read between the lines, if my mother had left well enough alone none of us would be here, now would we?" Syra set in the course coordinates. "Prepare to jump to hyperspace on my mark."  
  
Tethys complied, and was silent for a little bit as they cascaded through hyperspace. "Your father and mother both would be proud, you know," the droid said. "You are quite lucky to have the family that you did and still do…"   
  
"Yeah…" Syra smiled slightly, thinking back to one of the few times she and her father and mother had been in the same place at the same time… a long time ago.  
  
***  
"Hold it steady…" Boba Fett propped up the laser-sighted spear gun in Kashya's hands, even as Cassandra moved to do something similar with the tiny lightsaber in 5 year old Syra's hands. The laser sight had been disabled and Cassandra was blocking their Force abilities; both girls were being made to shoot entirely by eye.   
  
"This is impossible." Kashya grumbled, but they had all gotten used to such grumbles by now. Kashya was resistant to learning anything remotely resembling the combat skills that Boba Fett tried to teach her. She much preferred the more subtle, more passive techniques her mother used, although Fett had found uses for those as well.  
  
"It's not impossible." Boba Fett gave the girls one of his rare smiles, reflected in Cassandra's eyes. "I used to do this when I was half your age."  
  
Both girls stared at the man, unable to imagine their father as a child.  
  
"Keep concentrating," Cassandra gently reminded them, "Think of it this way… you get to eat what you catch. Which means if you don't get anything…"  
  
"Mo-o-om!"   
***  
  
Syra chuckled. Despite the threat, both girls had been good enough to get enough lake animals to cook for dinner. She had later realized that both parents had accepted this as a matter of course. No child born to them could be otherwise. No child born to both of them could be anything less than intelligent, clever, and physically capable of just about anything. To a certain extent, it was true. Their genetics and their temperments made it so.  
  
Tethys's beeping woke her out of her day-dreaming. "We are coming up on Ceneth," the droid informed her. "Whatever it is you're going to do, you had best prepare to do it now."  
  
"I know, I know," Syra said, unstrapping herself from the pilot's chair and making sure she had all her things within easy reach. Her father had made her leave the more noticeable parts of her armor at home, but she had also been made to take as much of her armor as she could get away with wearing anywhere near the Academy. This meant chestplate, arm bracers, and greaves over her flight suit. She armored up quickly, efficiently, with the movements that had been ingrained in her from the time she was old enough to stick her head in her father's helmet and wander around her mother's compound. She wondered if her father still had the holos around, the embarrassing ones of a little helmet with feet. Her mother had laughed... her father had taught her how to put on and use the armor.  
  
They landed in the rudimentary dock her mother had finally had built, a year after Syra had been born. She stepped onto the platform with a feeling of déjà vu, of emptiness… it wasn't at all how she had expected her homecoming to be. The place seemed to echo, even more lonely than it had been when they had got back after the ill-fated visit to a watery planet on the edge of the Rim. She barely remembered the planet, but she did remember coming home. Even then, it had been coming home to Romy, with her father. She remembered Romy and her father having a huge fight, and she'd gone into her father's ship (the only place she'd felt safe) and hid until it was over. Even then, and every time afterwards, she'd come home to either Romy or her father. Now neither of them were there, and the whole place seemed empty.  
  
"Hi Dad. I'm home," she said as she walked through the door. Her voice didn't raise above a whisper, and it still sounded loud. Syra shook her head slowly, calling upon her father's trademark stoicism. If she didn't, she thought she might break down and cry right there. Without her mother, the droids had mostly fallen into disrepair. Her father had eventually deactivated most of them and put them into storage. Tethys had remained as a sort of rudimentary nanny to Syra, while Domitian had remained to maintain the compound. She didn't know where the old protocol droid was anymore, though. Or, for that matter, where her father was.  
  
His helmet was sitting on a very much burned out comm console, as she'd half-expected. She fell into the chair in front of the console and stared at the screen. "Come on, Dad. Tell me what to do. I've never done this before." She picked up the helmet and turned it around in her hands. It seemed odd, the helmet here and her father… wherever. He was never without his armor, or part of it. Most definitely he was never without his helmet, which had inspired fear in peoples across the galaxy. With a feeling almost of shame or embarrassment she slowly pulled it over her head. It helped a little, both the familiar action of trying on her father's helmet and the familiar scent on it, very masculine, very comforting. The thing actually fit now, almost. Syra started to cry.  
  
"Initiating message sequence," the helmet said in her father's voice, and she yelped. The noise sounded odd when filtered through the voice distortion on the speakers. An image of her father appeared, overlaying the view through the visor. Syra's eyes opened wide, but she didn't dare take the helmet off.  
  
"Syra… if you're watching this, you've done what your mother would have done and came after me anyway. I'm proud of you, preciosa. Your mother would be proud of you as well."  
  
Syra swallowed hard.  
  
"I need you to do several things for me, now, and all of them will be very dangerous. The people who have me at the moment don't know you exist, and it should stay that way. I need you to use the armor and track us. Enlist one person's help if you have to, but only one person. Go to your sources for information, you can even try Dengar if you have to, but don't take anyone with you. You travel fastest when you travel alone." There was a pause. "That Jedi boyfriend of yours would be a good choice."  
  
Syra, too young to hear the tension in her father's voice and ascribe it to old pains, winced as she heard Jacen referred to in such terms.  
  
"I don't know where they're taking us, but I do know it has something to do with clones. Be careful, Syra, and be very strong. A long time ago some people created a clone army from… my DNA. I think they're trying to do it again. Be very careful, because you know what this means."  
  
"It means I could see people who look like you, but aren't you…" Syra whispered. The thought of having to look up and see a whole army of men who looked exactly like her father was... intimidating. The thought of having to fight them...  
  
"Your … talents will help with that. Meet me at these coordinates as soon as you possibly can; I think this is where they're taking me. You've been there before, if you remember. If they haven't taken me there, track me down as fast as you possibly can. Time is not on our side in this, and there might be more at stake here than …" he trailed off, and Syra caught him reasserting the cool veneer that he presented to the world. "than either of us would like."  
  
"I'm proud of you, Syra. Always remember that."  
  
His image winked out of her sight. Syra curled up in the chair and took off the helmet, setting it reverently down on the ruined console and staring into the T-shaped visor that had brought terror and panic to so many, and only brought comfort to her. The sense of abandonment returned as she realized she might never see it on anyone except in a mirror again, and she buried her face in her hands and cried for a little while.  
  
  
  
  
  
Master Skywalker,  
I have to be gone for a little while. My father's in trouble, and I think it's serious trouble this time. Don't worry about me, I'll be okay, we do this all the time. I'll be back when I can.  
-- Linnara  
  
"Well, someone's got to go after her," Jaina had said stubbornly. "She needs help." Her tone of voice had suggested an internal debate as to whether the help was psychiatric or martial.  
  
"Master Skywalker said we shouldn't," Jacen had pointed out, more in the way of a perfunctory no-stop-please than as any sort of actual objection. He knew better than to argue with his sister when she got an idea that firmly planted in her head. The twins had been standing around the empty room where Linnara had used to live, and where the note had been found. Unfortunately for the would-be rescuers, it hadn't been found until sometime later that day; they'd all assumed something tragic had happened, and that 'Nara simply wanted her privacy.   
  
"Master Skywalker can go… Mmm. Well, she does need help. And it's not like she's got anyone else. I mean, isn't she practically an orphan? Or she will be, if her father really is in as much trouble as she's implying. And I don't think she has any friends outside the Academy. We're the only ones who can help her."  
  
"We're the only ones who know that she needs help," Jacen had said. "And we can't all go running to the rescue. Someone has to stay behind and explain things to Master Skywalker."  
  
In retrospect, from his vantage point of being ensconced in the tiny shuttle and tapping his fingers impatiently on the console, Jacen wondered what the hell he and his sister could have been thinking. This was an extremely ill-advised plan, probably suicide, and they didn't even have a clue where Linnara had been from anyway. She'd never talked much about her past, which had only convinced Jaina further when Jacen had brought it up that the girl needed their help. Unfortunately it had been Jacen who had ended up going to find help, being the only one with something resembling a plan.  
  
A damn stupid plan, the boy thought to himself. This is never going to work. Dad's going to kill me, he mused wryly. If Mom doesn't first.   
  
Jaina had talked about a pilot, not in Rogue Squadron but in Wraith, that had had an extreme talent for identifying people by their movements, or their speech. It took him a while and some fast talking around Wedge, and he didn't think the older man believed his story about being a big fan of Garik Loran anyway, but he managed to get an idea of where he could find the pilot. Fortunately for Jacen's sanity they were on leave, not on maneuvers. Even better, they were on leave in the upper levels of Coruscant, where Jacen could visit with relative impunity. He landed the Headhunter amidst the squadron of X-Wings, feeling distinctly out of place and out of his league.  
  
"You wanted to talk to me?" A voice said from directly behind him, causing Jacen to jump and spin and barely suppress a yelp. He'd been so preoccupied with the insanity of what he was doing that he'd completely failed to notice that Loran had been waiting in the hanger. Stupid. Real stupid. Real good way to get yourself killed, if you're going into what I think you're going into.  
  
"Yeah…" Jacen said, once he got his heart to stop pounding. "I need your... ability to read people. To figure out where they're from. I've got a friend who's in trouble… Only I don't know where she's from."  
  
Loran arched an eyebrow. "City?"  
  
"Planet."  
  
"Planet." Loran thought this over. "What system?"  
  
"I don't know that either," Jacen admitted.  
  
"You don't know where she's from… what's her name?"  
  
"Linnara Antilles."  
  
"Hmmm." Loran shook his head slowly. "So you're going to help this kid you've become friends with. Only you don't know where she's from, or even what system she's from… do you know what species she is?"  
  
"Human," Jacen said acerbically. "I know, I know, it's stupid."   
  
"Damn right it's stupid. I suppose that's why I'm helping you. All right, show me what you've got."  
  
Jacen displayed the footage he'd managed to cobble together. It wasn't much, Linnara had (intentionally, he saw with hindsight) avoided being recorded in just about any fashion, even in play. But there had been times, such as birthday parties or late-night adventures, when she hadn't been able to avoid the camera. Voice recordings were easier. Loran frowned. "It's almost so obscure even I can't place it. That system's out … practically beyond the Rim, she really is from the back end of nowhere, isn't she?"  
  
Jacen hadn't noticed, but he wasn't about to say that to the Wraith pilot and give him even more of an excuse to be sarcastic. Jokes about his uncle's former farmboy status always flew thick and fast, given half an opportunity. "I guess so."  
  
"She's picked up some mannerisms from all over the place, though… I don't know how she would have gotten off-planet before you guys. Most of the population of that planet is barely space-flight capable, much less hyperspace-capable."  
  
"So you know where she's from, then," Jacen said, trying not to sound impatient.   
  
"A little planet called Cenath… if you dig, I'd bet you can find the coordinates." Jacen was already climbing back aboard his ship. "You're welcome," Loran called up.  
  
"Thanks!" Jacen called back before the canopy closed. "I think," he muttered as he maneuvered off planet. This is such a mistake. Master Skywalker's going to kill me. If Dad or Mom doesn't get to me first… 


	4. Chapter Three

Syra was fishing.  
  
It chafed at her, a little, the delay that she was causing by sitting on the edge of the lake with a spear-gun. She was all armored but not helmeted, the laser sights and aiming mechanisms turned off as her father had taught her, hitting the large creatures entirely by eye. She was packed and ready to fly out at a moment's notice, with Tethys standing by in the ship and waiting for her command. But she was also incredibly nervous, and very much afraid. Afraid that she really was alone and that, despite the evidence of her Force senses telling her otherwise, her father was dead. Afraid that she was the last of her line, a legacy that went back in both of her parent's histories, a formidable history of formidable people and deeds that she never thought she'd match up to. Afraid that she'd fail her heritage.  
  
Ridiculous. Boba Fett had crawled his way out of a Sarlaac pit. He wasn't dead now, not at the hands of Imperials who couldn't plot a course out of a dead-end tunnel.   
  
Knowing that didn't make it any better, but Syra had grown up knowing the value of being calm in one's mind. She had hardly ever seen her father at anything less than calm, with the occasional undercurrents of tension, affection, weariness, or worry. By contrast her mother had been a veritable storm of emotion and passion… but she had somehow managed to maintain a center of perfect stillness, perfect peace at the heart of it all. They had gone well together. It was almost ironic that her father, who disliked the Jedi so much and so strongly, should espouse one of their core beliefs so fervently. It was, however, one of the core teachings of both her father and her mother… what little she had learned from her mother. So, fishing.  
  
***  
"Isn't that a lot like what the Jedi teach, though?" Syra asked. Her father scowled, but it was more the sort of scowl that said he was forced to agree with something he really disliked. Still, it was relatively unusual, as her father tended not to have extreme likes or dislikes.   
  
"It is, but it's also good policy. Not all of what the Jedi teach is idealism and daydreams. Some of it is good for survival… it has to be, or else they wouldn't have lasted through the Empire. Clarity of thinking is one of them. If you're distracted by emotion, you can't think clearly, and that's when you start to lose."  
  
"Is that why you're sending me away?" Syra asked, more plaintively than she wanted it to sound. Boba Fett had never responded positively to whining, by anyone's definition.   
  
But the tone of her voice hadn't drawn the response she'd expected. Her father sighed, and seemed to slump forward. "If your mother were here, she'd be able to teach you about the Force, things I can't teach you even in theory. But she's not, and neither is your sister, and no one else is qualified to teach you. And you'll need that knowledge, even if it does come with idealist philosophy. You'll need that knowledge because no knowledge is wasted, and because I want you to use all your skills to the best of your ability."  
  
"Even the ones you don't agree with?"  
  
He smiled slightly, but it was a tired smile. "Even the ones I don't agree with."  
***  
  
Fishing.  
  
Syra had a small pile of creatures in a bucket to her right, but she wasn't fishing for food so much as for the time to collect herself. They swam around discontentedly in the bucket; a bit guilty, she promised them silently that she'd turn them loose when she was done. She watched the water ripple with the movements of the creatures in it, barely breathing, waiting patiently. Then the water began to ripple with more than just the natural movements of the lake-dwellers and she stood up abruptly, tossing on her helmet and turning around with a slight creak of synth-leather and crank of metal. Absently, she kicked the bucket of lake creatures back into the water. A ship was landing, and it didn't look like the Slave II. In fact…  
  
Her eyes widened. There was a Jedi aboard… Jacen, from the feel of it. If he caught her here… was he strong enough in the Force to tell it was her automatically? Would he even think to check… she was physically unrecognizable in her armor, modeled after her father's, but if he pushed he could most likely tell it was her, and then she just didn't know what he would do. A Fett with Jedi powers, meeting the son of Han Solo for the first time. She'd grown up in both families. She knew the stories from both sides of the fence. Jacen, on the other hand, knew only what his father had told him. That Boba Fett had been a formidable, deadly bounty hunter, and that even now they weren't sure whether he was dead or alive. Jacen knew Boba Fett wasn't force-sensitive... but if he sensed another person in the Force, and saw that the other person was in armor that hadn't been seen on anyone but a Fett in centuries... what would he do?  
  
  
  
  
  
Jacen was nervous.  
  
Linnara's home planet was out in the middle of nowhere, and he could kind of see why she and her father spent most of their time cruising around the galaxy. There wasn't much here except beautiful scenery; there were only two spots on the planet that had docking capabilities for spaceships, and one of them was on the mainland in the center of more attention than he wanted right now. Knowing Linnara's penchant for privacy and obscurity, it was probably more public than she or her family would have wanted too. Besides, if he was wrong, there was only one other spaceport to try. If he couldn't find any sign of her there…. Well, he'd deal with that when he came to it. She had to be here, anyway. He didn't know where else to look.  
  
He landed the ship on one of the two other vacant platforms… one platform had a small Incom Heatwave on it. Was that her ship? He didn't know, and he couldn't sense her presence on the island… although there was someone here who seemed familiar somehow. He couldn't place the person; every time he tried to concentrate on the presence he sensed in the Force it seemed to slip away, like trying to get hold of a mercury bead. He couldn't even tell if the other person was Force sensitive, or of a species that had that sort of obscure aura as an innate ability, or if the other person was just naturally talentet. Well, he'd figure it out when he saw him or her.  
  
The ramp descended, and he walked out slowly and carefully. He didn't feel any sort of threat in the Force, but that didn't mean one didn't exist. Something had to have happened, something bad, for Linnara to go running off like that. And he'd come to realize on the trip out to the planet exactly how little he really knew about her. It was unnerving, and it meant that he had even less of an idea what was waiting for him. Not for the first time, he thought ruefully about how stupid he was being, and resolved never to tell anyone who didn't absolutely need to know about it.   
  
The house that he presumed Linnara had lived in was huge. In fact, it was more like a mansion. He hadn't figured Linnara for such opulent surroundings, but then again it was also less ostentatious than some of the places he had been to with his mother on state visits. More big than grand. He looked around, trying to find the other person through the Force, with little result. It was as though he or she was staying just outside the edge of his perception somehow, deliberately. He wasn't sure whether to be worried or just wary. Definitely wary at the very least; the place was big enough to hide a platoon. But it was also quiet, in sound and in the Force, too quiet for a small army. He was probably safe. If only this other person would step out and face him...  
  
Jacen was so intent on finding the other person through the Force that he barely heard the clearly audible footsteps behind him. He whirled around just in time to see the blaster in his face, and drew his lightsaber before the other could react. At least, that was the way it was supposed to work.  
  
He drew his lightsaber, and the person in Mandalorian armor rocketed upwards, launched by the jet-pack he'd heard so much about. The person hovered there, just out of the reach of his lightsaber, and Jacen stared in utter shock.  
  
"Boba Fett?!"  
  
He'd heard about the legendary bounty hunter who had chased down his father for years, heard about the carbonite and the Sarlaac and all the tales that had followed. But if that was true, Boba Fett had to be … Jacen stared.  
  
"Boba Fett?"  
  
The bounty hunter in Mandalorian armor sank slowly to the ground, touching down lightly and not moving the blaster from its position pointed at Jacen. He stared at the young Jedi apprentice for a bit… and then, much to Jacen's confusion, slowly began to chuckle.  
  
"Not quite. He's out at the moment, did you want to leave a message?"  
  
Whoever it was was finding this whole situation incredibly humorous. Jacen fought down irritation and concern. "Where is he?"  
  
The bounty hunter was silent.  
  
"If you're not Boba Fett, what are you doing wearing his armor?"  
  
"It's not his armor," the bounty hunter said, and gave another one of those quiet chuckles. "It's my armor." He didn't elaborate. Was this a Mandalorian? Probably not, they'd been dead for centuries. But then... why the armor?  
  
"Oh really."  
  
"Yes."  
  
This was getting him nowhere. Jacen could tell he was getting impatient, and fought that back. He was also becoming moderately unnerved at the silent person in Mandalorian armor, staring into the T-shaped visor. The bounty hunter lowered the blaster after a bit and stood at parade rest, one wrist clasped in the other hand. Jacen had a brief flash of a holo he'd seen once, of Boba Fett in the exact same position. If this person wasn't Boba Fett, he was doing a damn good job of imitating the infamous bounty hunter. And even if the person wasn't Boba Fett, he was doing a damn good job of being just as scary, just as intimidating as the infamous bounty hunter was said to be. Jacen wondered what Boba Fett would think if he knew about this imposter. He wondered what his father would think.  
  
"What do you want?" Jacen said, with the increasing feeling that he really didn't have time for this. The bounty hunter stared at him measuringly.  
  
"I'm looking for Boba Fett." Jacen wasn't sure about the advisability of that, and said so. It only got him laughed at. "Trust me, he won't mind. How do you think I got this armor?"  
  
"Oh." Jacen blinked. The idea of Fett working with anyone… he'd never heard of that before. Then again, he hadn't heard all of the Fett stories either. The visor was really making him uncomfortable.  
  
"You're not supposed to be here," the bounty hunter said then, and it didn't sound friendly. Jacen backed up a couple of paces, switched his lightsaber off, and held his hands up in what he hoped was a non-threatening gesture.  
  
"I'm just looking for a friend, okay? I got a lead that she lived here, a while ago, but I don't know where… I think she's in trouble, or at least I think her family's in trouble… her father… and she went off to go help. We just wanted to see if she needed help…"  
  
The bounty hunter looked at him for a long time. Jacen shifted uneasily from one foot to the other. There was something profoundly familiar about this bounty hunter, but there was also something profoundly unsettling. After several minutes of staring he began to walk forward, and it was only then that Jacen realized that he was in fact a she. Interesting.  
  
"I'll make you a deal. You help me find Boba Fett, and I'll help you find your friend. Between the two of us… well, I'm sure you know of Boba Fett's reputation. Jacen Solo."  
  
Jacen shivered. He didn't know how she knew who he was, and it was highly unnerving that she did. What else did she know about him? "I've heard stories," he temporized, trying to read her through the Force. He couldn't, and that made him even more unnerved. It was time to get out of there. "Look, I'll go… get … help," he started, although he didn't know what kind of help he was going to get. If this was Boba Fett's… apprentice, whatever… it wasn't likely that they'd welcome any kind of help he could give. Except…  
  
"You do that," the woman said, some sort of hidden amusement in her voice. "Here's some coordinates to get you started. Find out everything you can about this planet." She passed him a datapad with some coordinates and a name written on it: Kamino. "I'll be waiting."  
  
"I'll be back," Jacen promised, and raced to the ship. If Dad wasn't going to kill me before, he's really going to kill me now.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
Syra waited until Jacen was safely off-planet before falling to her knees, yanking off the helmet, and laughing hysterically. It wasn't the nicest thing she'd done, but she had no idea how he'd react to her true identity being kept hidden all these years. Although, really, even the son of Han Solo had to recognize the fact that the daughter of Boba Fett would have had, at the very least, an interesting welcome at the Skywalker Jedi Academy. He would have to understand, even a little, why she'd have to keep her real identity under wraps if she so much as set foot on the Academy grounds, much less attended classes there. He must be able to understand what would happen between the Solos, the Skywalkers, and the lone Fett girl.  
  
So many names. So much history.  
  
Besides, if she'd told him who she was, even given him the slightest hint of who she was in either identity, he would have been able to put two and two together. He would have realized who he was dealing with, and her father had already told her that the fewer people who knew about her the better. At least, who knew about her as the daughter of Boba Fett. Linnara Antilles, daughter of a Rim trader, wasn't in any real danger as far as anyone knew. Syra Fett, on the other hand, would be a target for anyone who wanted to make a name for himself or worse, get revenge on Boba. And that was a long list of unsavory characters.  
  
She shook her head. She was wool-gathering, and that had to stop. The planet name she had given him would keep him busy for a little while but not too terribly long; hopefully it was on their star charts at… wherever he was going. She, of course, knew where Kamino was and what importance it had, having dug into some of her mother's old files and used the coordinates her father had given her as a base for the search. Just the thought of all those clones… it made her shake. And she'd visited there, that last trip before her mother...  
  
But it didn't sound as though they were holding him there… did it? Surely the last vestiges of the Empire couldn't be foolish enough to try and use the Kamino cloning facilities without the benefit of the Kaminoans, who were not likely to render their help a second time after what had happened the first time. Surely the Empire wasn't going to try to use a failed and expensive tactic again. Then again, Syra thought wryly, this was the Empire. The last vestiges of the Empire were not known for their intelligence, only their animal cunning. Intelligence had died with Thrawn, or so she had come to believe. If it had ever existed in the Empire in the first place.  
  
Syra went over to her ship and began powering it back down. After all, she wouldn't be going anywhere anytime soon, not until Jacen came back… unless of course he didn't come back in time. Not that she knew what 'in time' would be, but she was in tune enough with her father through the Force that she figured she could start to sense if things got urgent. That was the idea anyway. Syra flopped into the pilot's seat and stared out the front viewer, suddenly feeling very tired and young. She didn't really care if her father had done more with less at her age, now it was her turn and she wasn't sure if she was up to the task. Only this time if she wasn't, it was her father's life on the line.   
  
"Dad…" she reached over to one side and picked up her father's helmet, looking from it to her own. "C'mon, Dad, give me a sign. A clue. Something." She curled up in the chair with the helmet, letting it droop forward to touch her forehead. Unaware of the echoes of the past. "I miss you."  
  
If she hadn't been sniffling quietly, if she hadn't still had the helmet in her hands and right up to her nose she would have missed it. The voice was quiet, and coming from the inside of the helmet. She slid it onto her head, wondering who was trying to contact Boba Fett, and why, and how…  
  
"… won't always be there." It was her father's voice, and her father's face she saw in the faceplate, the same way he'd left the message for her before. Tears welled up in her eyes again. He looked sad, too. "I was younger than you were when I learned this the hard way, and with luck you won't be learning it now."  
  
"I won't give you the speech my father gave me…" That made Syra blink. Her father had never mentioned anything about his childhood. Ever. "Because that would imply that we won't see each other again. We will, you can count on that. But I imagine you're still feeling pretty alone right now."  
  
"Just remember: you're a survivor. It's in your blood, from both your mother and me. You're strong, and you'll find a way to get done what needs to be done, because that's what you do. That's what you were born and raised to do. And don't let you convince yourself otherwise. All the battles are won or lost here," he tapped the side of his head, "before they're even fought. It's how I've stayed alive, and it's how you'll stay alive too. You're my daughter, I know you well enough to know that. And even better, you're Cassandra's daughter. You're a survivor born of survivors, and that's what you'll do, and do well."  
  
Syra smiled slightly. That was her father, always reassuring in the most grim, backhanded way.  
  
"You'll feel alone, and you'll feel scared, but you'll do what you need to do anyway. Do what it is you fear the most, and you'll find the courage you seek." It had the tone of a Lesson. Syra nodded slowly. Her father's face looked as though he wanted to say something else, and then it slowly faded away.  
  
Syra's smile grew. It had been exactly the right thing to do, but then her father always knew exactly the right thing to do. Even when it came to things like emotions.  
  
***  
"Dad… you loved Mom, right?"  
  
Her father looked sharply at her. "Why?"  
  
"Isn't that a strong emotion? Doesn't that mean it's a bad thing?" Syra's face reflected confusion, and great concern. She knew he loved her, and her mother and sister, very much. But if strong emotions like love were a bad thing…  
  
Boba Fett took a deep breath. He thought over how to answer, thought carefully because he knew exactly what was riding on this answer. "There is nothing in the universe that is entirely bad, or entirely good. Emotions are usually bad because most people let them become a weakness. Your mother learned how to make her emotions become her strength… "  
  
The little girl barely caught the whisper, and didn't realize the importance till years later. "… and so did I."  
***  
  
Syra, five years later, grinned. Her father always did know the right thing to do, and he had raised her to be at least as good, if not better. She had the knowledge, she had the resources, and she had the training to do everything she needed to do. And, thanks to her father's well-timed messages, she had the will to carry it out. All she had to do now was wait for Jacen to come back with backup or help or resources, and then someone would start learning exactly what it meant to mess with the Fett family. Now all she wondered was what kind of help he had in mind…  
  
"Dad!" Jacen skidded to a halt outside the room where his parents were staying, catching them just as they were leaving. Good. That meant he didn't run the risk of getting trapped there for a long explanation. "I need to borrow the Falcon…" 


	5. Chapter Four

"You need to what?!"  
  
Han Solo couldn't believe his ears. Or his eyes. Or any of his senses that told him his son was standing in front of him asking to borrow his beloved Millennium Falcon to rescue the bounty hunter who had attempted to capture or kill Han on several occasions. It was too impossible. The universe just wasn't that perverted. "Run that by me again," he said, very quietly.   
  
Jacen took a deep breath, aware of just how much crap he was digging himself into and how rapidly it was going over his head. "A friend of mine disappeared from the Academy… we think she ran off to help her father. Except that it looks like her father was captured by Boba Fett… and to get her father away from the bounty hunter we have to help this… other person… find Fett first." The kid winced at how that whole thing sounded. "And you keep saying, the Falcon's the fastest ship in the galaxy…"  
  
Han wasn't about to spoil his ship's reputation by telling his son that that was more the effect of good piloting and good mechanical skills and less the actual ship itself. "So you think… well, number one, you think your friend's father is still alive after getting caught by Boba Fett…"  
  
Jacen winced, realizing how unlikely this was, but nodded. "Well, we hope so anyway."  
  
"And number two, you think I want to get anywhere near that bounty hunter."  
  
"You don't have to go!" Jacen said hastily, and then realized what that meant. "I mean…"  
  
"I know what you meant." Han was trying not to laugh. As serious as the situation was, it was also hugely ironic. And it was amusing to watch his son try to justify his requests, and try to get Han on his side, or at least to see his point of view.   
  
"What did he mean?" Leia asked, coming in from the bedroom where she had been packing for yet another state visit to some backwater planet. Apparently she hadn't heard the previous discussion on Jacen's request.  
  
"Jacen… well, he can tell you," Han said, going over and flopping heavily into a chair, a look of exaggerated weariness on his face. He was definitely enjoying this. Jacen swallowed his fear and briefly outlined his plan to his mother, who arched her eyebrows in disbelief. She exchanged an amused look with Han that their son didn't catch.  
  
"Han… your son wants to borrow your ship," Leia commented dryly.  
  
"My son? Now he's my son?"  
  
"Only your son would come up with such a nerf-brained idea."  
  
Jacen started to relax. If his parents were bickering playfully like this, trading jokes back and forth, it meant he wasn't really in trouble. He hadn't thought his parents would object to his wanting to help a friend, especially since it didn't involve anything that might create an interplanetary incident. He also knew his family, and figured that Uncle Luke had already been by telling them about what had happened, and what the Solo kids were probably up to. Hell, getting into trouble with wild, nerf-brained schemes to rescue friends ran in the bloodline. On both the Solo and the Skywalker sides. It wasn't like he was doing anything his parents and uncle hadn't done ten times before.  
  
But he still didn't have permission… "Dad…"  
  
Han turned to his son. His face was grave this time, and Jacen gulped. "When we get out of the Core, I want you to follow my lead. You do what I tell you, when I tell you, no argument and no questions." He took a deep breath. "And when this is all over you and I are going to have a talk about who you associate with…" he said, but more ruefully than angrily.  
  
Jacen nodded, thankful to be getting off so lightly. And even more thankful that his father was going to get involved. Suddenly he felt a lot safer, and a lot more confident in their abilities to rescue Linnara's father.   
  
"Go get packed, kid. We leave in three hours." Han sighed, pushing himself out of the chair. Jacen could have sworn he heard his Dad mutter "I'm getting too old for this," as he turned to run to his own room and pack. Then the breath was knocked out of him as he ran directly into Chewbacca, who was coming in. He growled an interrogative at Han's expression, and at Jacen's clearly panicked stance.  
  
"Uh… Dad… you want to explain to Chewie what we're about to do?"  
  
"Uh-uh, son. It's your idea, you get to tell him."  
  
"Great."  
  
  
  
  
Syra sorted through the stream of data that was flying past her eyes. The HoloNet was packed these days, most of it with irrelevant information. She could have reactivated the droids and had them looking through it in a matter of minutes, but one of the unspoken lessons she'd taken from her father was that everything was better if you did it yourself, or at least checked it over. So she was going through the information on her own, sorting through what was possibly relevant and what was probably useless. It was a long and tedious process. Besides, it kept her from going completely insane.  
  
Syra rubbed her eyes. It had been a day now, and not only was Jacen not back with help, she was no closer to finding out where her father had gone, except for the dubious clue of the planet Kamino. Her father had given her the coordinates, and it was slightly familiar even beyond being relatively close, but she couldn't figure out why they had gone there the one time or why it would be important. She hadn't paid much attention when she'd been younger, with the blithe certainty of a child that if it wasn't interesting to her now, it couldn't be important later. It was largely a dead planet, the sole industry which it served having gone out of business before even she was born. Possibly even before her father was born, but she doubted it. Not if he knew what had been going on around there… and then…  
  
She frowned. Maybe that was the key… the planet. The coordinates cross-referenced nicely with the search she was running… and came up with more entries than she would have expected, given the backwater nature of the planet. She scanned them, her frown of confusion turning into a scowl of worry as she saw that the Slave II had been discovered floating, adrift, abandoned.  
  
Her father never abandoned his ship. The only reason he would abandon his ship would be to ensure the safety of…  
  
Syra snarled, resisting the urge to hit something or better still, ignite her lightsaber and cut something to ribbons. It was because of her that Boba Fett had abandoned his ship, abandoned most of the principles he had spent… well, okay, maybe it wasn't entirely because of her. Syra was young, but she wasn't stupid. She smiled slightly, tiredly, and calmed herself down. She was her father's daughter, but she was her mother's daughter too.   
  
***  
"You're not just sending her away to train her Force skills, are you?" Romy, always suspicious, stood in the doorway of the room with her arms folded, watching the bounty hunter.  
  
"What do you mean?" he asked, not looking up from the console where he was putting together identities for himself and Syra. This job, though it was really a job for a slicer, wasn't one he'd trust to anyone else.   
  
"You're sending her away because she's starting to look like her mother," Romy said quietly. It was difficult to tell exactly what she thought of the whole thing. She'd never made any secret of her dislike for the bounty hunter Cassandra had chosen to be with, but she'd never questioned her friend's decision either. "And you can't stand it."  
***  
  
Syra closed her eyes and clenched her fists. They hadn't thought she'd overheard that conversation, and since neither of them were Force sensitive they hadn't noticed why she'd disappeared for hours afterwards. She missed her mother too, even though the woman was barely a warm and happy memory in the back of her mind. For her father, some days it had to be unendurable. And now his one remaining daughter was in danger…   
  
Focus. She had to focus.   
  
Syra typed a flurry of commands into the console, filtering out everything that came from a so-called 'official' channel, anything that came from the lower-end opportunistic bottom-feeders, and permitting through only communications to and from people she'd heard of. Being a bounty hunter's daughter, that involved a fair bit more than it might have ordinarily. She'd heard of such hunters as Bossk, IG-88, Dengar (who supposedly was not in the game anymore, although she knew from the way her father talked of him that he kept his hand in occasionally), and Zuckuss. She'd even heard of the more obscure ones, such as Djas Puhr or Aurra Sing. It was those communications she was interested in. They, of all people, would be most concerned if Boba Fett lived or died. Well, second-most concerned.  
  
There wasn't anything specifically on her father, or the Slave II… and she wasn't experienced enough to read the undertones and hidden messages she knew were there. She did, however, find one bit of information that interested her… the location of Dengar's so-called legitimate business. Her father had been there on several occasions, but had steadfastly refused to take her anywhere near there as far as she knew about. This had been partially at her mother's request and partially of his own ideas. Syra had the impression that while her father was perfectly willing, even insistent, on helping out from the sidelines where she couldn't see him, she'd never catch him helping her as obviously as giving her contacts from his past. She'd have to trade, borrow, bribe, or threaten her own people.  
  
Well, she thought grimly, now it was time to bribe and threaten. She dumped all the information she'd gleaned, along with all the conclusions she'd drawn, onto a datacard and slipped it into the dusty flightsuit she wore under her armor. She'd learned all she could from sitting at a desk, safely ensconced in her home. Now it was time to see if Jacen had made good on whatever idea he'd had, and just how much help he could be.  
  
  
  
  
"Aren't you a little short for a Fett?" was the first thing that popped out of Han Solo's mouth when the bounty hunter had landed. It wasn't entirely a flippant question, either. The person in the Mandalorian armor was roughly Jacen's height, probably a little shorter. If the bounty hunter had taken offense, he didn't show it. "Son. You and I have to talk." Han Solo glanced over at the bounty hunter, wondering if that helmet was equipped with listening devices and if it would matter at all if they went a little ways apart to talk privatel. Probably not. What the hell. "Excuse us."  
  
"Of course." Even the voice that came from the helmet was the same. Han had the disturbing feeling that whoever was behind that helmet was laughing at him. He walked a little away with his son, who had an expression of deep-rooted fear on his face, the sort of fear that came from not knowing whether or not two people he had to work with were going to kill each other. Han recognized that fear; he went through it every time Lando and Chewie had to work together. Then again, in this case the unknown person was as likely to turn on both of them as on Han Solo himself, which upped the ante by a great deal. Han was disliking this whole operation more and more by the minute. At least there wasn't a bounty on his head anymore. Well not as big of one.  
  
"Son," he started, more calmly than he'd expected, "You do remember the stories I told you about what happens when you get mixed up with anyone named Fett, right?"  
  
"Well, maybe she's not…" Jacen started lamely, and didn't even finish. They both looked over at the armored figure, who was watching and waiting in Boba Fett's traditional pose, parade rest, one hand on the other wrist. It was like the dreaded bounty hunter in miniature. It was almost even funny.  
  
"What's your name?" Han called over, dreading to know.  
  
"Syra Fett."  
  
"That's what I thought." Han turned to his son, who was now wearing an expression of resigned dread. "They spawned. Who knew. Probably breed asexually or something... Unless that's really a clone… Whatever." He shook his head, dragging his mind back to the question at hand. "Look, you're sure you want to do this?"  
  
"I'm sure, Dad."  
  
Han took a deep breath. "All right. If you really think this is the best, quickest way to get your friend back safely. I'm pretty sure this won't come back to bite us in the ass, and it's not even that bad of an idea. Although frankly, I wouldn't trust any Fett as far as I can throw him…"  
  
"Wrong polarity," Syra Fett said, and this time Han caught the definite tinge of amusement. Which was more reasonable as he realized what he… she… meant.  
  
"Excuse me," he said after two seconds of startlement, making a little bow. She only chuckled. Father and son exchanged a look of shared and wary confusion.  
  
"If there's nothing else," she added after a few minutes. "Let's get underway. Here are the coordinates," she handed them a datapad, and proceeded up the ramp of her ship. Han looked at the coordinates as he and Jacen turned to the Falcon, blinked, and turned back.   
  
"You … do know where this is, right?"  
  
She paused on the ramp, turned, and graced them with a brief nod in response.  
  
"And you do know who lives there, right?"  
  
Again the nod. Apparently the talkative gene had skipped the Fett bloodline entirely.  
  
"And this is where we're going to find Boba Fett?"  
  
She stared at them both for a very long minute, and then disappeared into the bowels of her ship. The ramp began to pull inwards and the door began to close. Han watched it for a few moments and then headed up to the cockpit of his ship, shaking his head slowly. "I'm getting too old for this."  
  
  
  
  
  
Han Solo wasn't the only one. As Boba Fett was being escorted through the halls of some unknown Star Destroyer, he wondered exactly what it was that kept him in the business. It wasn't a common thought for him to have, but it had been coming more and more often of late.   
  
Fifteen years ago, he had been hunting because he enjoyed it on some sort of deeply-buried, visceral level. Eight years ago he had been hunting because it kept him and his family (a word that still came uneasily to his mind) in the sort of lifestyle they were accustomed to. Now, although he still enjoyed it (inasmuch as someone who had purged emotion from his life could enjoy anything), he really was starting to think he was getting too old for this. Especially when he looked at his daughter, whose youth and enthusiasm combined with the skills he had taught her served to make her a formidable bounty hunter. Perhaps even more formidable than him. It should have made him annoyed; in anyone else it would have. Because it was his daughter, though, he was proud. And it made him wonder. Maybe it was time to pass the mantle on to the younger generation. Maybe it was time to let his daughter rule the stars as the most formidable bounty hunter in ten systems. Maybe it really was time for him to retire. Thoughts for a later time.  
  
Fett and his stormtrooper escort arrived at their untold destination which turned out to be precisely what Fett had estimated it to be. Admiral Pellaeon nodded to the white-armored solders, who departed. Fett stared at the Imperial Admiral through his narrow slit of a visor, impassive, waiting.  
  
"I apologize for the temerity of my men," Pellaeon said after a few minutes. He didn't seem to be fazed by the bounty hunter. Then again, from the stories Fett had heard of Admiral Thrawn, it would take more than Fett to seriously faze Pellaeon, at least until the bounty hunter gave him a reason. "They were instructed to bring you here, not to employ force against you."  
  
"I see," Fett said, understanding perfectly. Pellaeon had probably instructed the soldiers to make sure Fett arrived on board the Star Destroyer in a more or less functional state. Violence, force, any of those would have been acceptable to achieve the goal. Then again, Pellaeon probably didn't know of the consequences of making it seem that Boba Fett had been kidnapped or killed. Which, all in all, was a good thing; it meant that Fett had done his job of hiding Syra well. Then again... if Pellaeon didn't realize that Syra would come after her father if she thought he was kidnapped, what did he mean by the safety of Fett's daughter? Did he know she existed? Did he just not care? If that was the case... Syra would make him care.  
  
Pellaeon stared at the bounty hunter a few minutes longer, then shrugged when he realized that the bounty hunter was employing his customary silence. "Actually, I wanted to bring you in for a job. I know this whole roundabout way of getting your attention seems a bit much, but believe me when I say that this is a matter that must be kept utterly secret, even from my own men. At the moment, they think I am threatening your life in some creative and obscure manner."  
  
You're not? Fett thought with no little touch of irony. "What's the job?" was all he said.  
  
Pellaeon activated a holo-display on the table between them, which showed a blue-ish planet that looked somehow familiar. "Just before the Clone Wars began, Palpatine ordered a project begun in the strictest secrecy on a backwater planet that had only one thing going for it: a very specific, very elite technology. He struck a deal with the inhabitants of the planet for several million units of … equipment… to be completed within ten years. Although the planet's economy was later destroyed, the planet and the equipment itself still remained… do you understand what I am saying?"  
  
Boba Fett hadn't thrown up from anything other than pure illness or injury since he was eight years old. He would have been proud of that fact, if he was still capable. Pellaeon's words in the last five minutes made him want to throw up. "Yes."  
  
"So far, I am the only official military person with any sort of idea that this is going on. If I bring any other officials into this, it will take more time than I have, and the facility will probably remain in existence just long enough to create more … product. However, I thought that you, of all people, would have both the motivation and the ability to destroy the facility without undue delay."  
  
'Undue delay.' Two very polite words that meant, don't give the opposition enough time to make more of you. Boba Fett thought of his childhood, growing up with all the clones of himself and his father, and suppressed a shudder. "I see," he said again, for lack of anything else. There was silence, and after a little while Pellaeon fidgeted.   
  
"A renegade faction of the Empire..." The former Empire, Fett thought, but didn't correct the Admiral. "Has siezed control of the planet. They are attempting to recreate the project, and began work on several million units of new, improved... product... many years ago. It was a little while before I could track down the source of the rumors, and a while longer before I came to the apparently inescapable conclusion that this job was best left to your abilities. However, believe me when I say that this facility must be destroyed with all speed possible. The improvements they have been making will cause instabilities in both the ... product... and the very economy and political fabric of the galaxy."  
  
"Well?"  
  
He was slightly amused at the way the Admiral avoided all mention of the clones, calling it all 'product' instead. Was it to confuse listeners (who probably already knew what was going on) or was it just to satisfy his peace of mind? It didn't matter too terribly much. Boba Fett was not about to allow this experiment to go on again, much less with any kind of so-called improvements. His father would rest in peace, dammit. And Syra would not have to go through the kind of nightmarish world he had to endure.  
  
"All right." 


	6. Chapter Five

Dengar's chop-shop was a sort of combination junkyard plus repair shop plus cantina. It was also about as treacherous as Mos Eisley and as dingy as the lower levels of Coruscant. Syra wrinkled her nose within her helmet as she left the ship and led the Solos to where she suspected either Dengar or Manaroo would be stationed. One of the hazards of being respectable, she thought with amusement, was that you also had to be readily available when the people you had to deal with needed to find you. While Syra's need wasn't exactly a legitimate business need, it was urgent and she knew exactly where and how to track down at least one, if not both of them. Besides, she felt and looked more at ease here than either of the Solos behind her. She smirked inside her helmet as she heard them fidgiting and whispering.   
  
Even better, the person currently behind the relatively unoccupied counter at the junkyard portion was Dengar. He was easily intimidated by the Fett armor, the Fett presence. And more importantly, he was one of her father's friends, which meant he didn't know what she looked like underneath the mask and quite probably had a deep-seated fear of ever finding out.   
  
"Dengar," she said, her voice coming out deeper and distorted through the helmet. The older man looked up and visibly paled.   
  
"B... ah, Syra," he corrected himself, noting the different armor. "It's been a while... either of you need anything?"   
  
He didn't seem to recognize the Solos, or if he did, he wasn't commenting on it. Syra was more than a bit relieved at that; it could cause her some serious trouble if people began to get the idea that she was cashing in on an old Solo bounty. "Of course," she said. It wasn't like this was a social call. "Information."   
  
That got his attention more than it should have. Dengar looked around, waved some obvious non-customers away, and motioned for her and the Solos to come inside the building that served as his offices. "Ah... uh, we'd better not talk about this in the open."   
  
Syra frowned. The Solos gave each other 'what the hell is going on' looks. She could understand and even empathize, but right now she had to be a Fett, silent and impassive and the best at what Fetts did. Wordlessly, she gestured for Dengar to lead the way.   
  
The inside wasn't much less cluttered than the outside. But it was quieter, and Dengar fiddled with what she was fairly sure were bug-detectors, making sure they weren't overheard. Finally he seemed satisfied, and they all sat down.   
  
"Your father came to see me a while ago," Dengar started, and behind the helmet Syra's expression grew posetively incredulous. "He bought a considerable number of weapons and engine parts for what I assume was your ship, and left them for you, along with an encrypted datacard." Syra opened her mouth to ask something, and Dengar held up a hand. "Now, I don't know and I don't want to know what's going on. He left in a big hurry, which always means that someone's going to die very soon. I'd rather it not be me, and to my way of thinking, the best way to ensure that it's not me is not to know anything."  
  
Syra scowled slightly. Dengar always had talked too much. Behind her she could practically hear the Solos giving each other startled looks.  
  
"Here's the datacard, and the key to the weapons locker where the stuff he bought is hidden. I'd like you to get it on your ship and off my station, please." Dengar's manner wasn't even unfriendly, but more pleading and very panicked. What the hell was going on?  
  
"Dengar, what's..."  
  
"There are Imperials looking for... for Him." Dengar interrupted. Syra fell silent immediately. "I don't know what they did to get him to go with them, but they did. And whatever kind of hold they've got on him, they managed to get him to jump through a lot of hoops and make a lot of detours to get to where they wanted him. Rumor has it that Admiral Pellaeon is in on it. At least, that's where the Slave II was last seen before they found it floating adrift..."  
  
"I heard..." Syra took a deep breath and took the datacard and locker key. "Don't tell the Imps anything," she rumbled.  
  
"I wouldn't!" Dengar actually managed to look indignant. Privately, Syra wondered if it was because he knew how young she was, or just if he was afraid of what would happen when Boba Fett found out. And did it really matter anyway? She just nodded and walked out. Behind her, she heard Dengar slump with relief as the Solos followed her through the door.  
  
And then she felt Han Solo's (it had to be him, he was taller) hand on her shoulder. "Okay, now we have to talk."  
  
Ordinarily she would have been happy to talk to him. She was tired, she was heartsick, and she missed her father terribly. But she was also annoyed at being given the runaround, even more annoyed on behalf of her father, and now Han Solo, who thought ... she didn't know what, specifically, he thought, but it was probably bad... Han Solo was putting his hand on her shoulder like he was going to try and boss her around. The hell with that. She grabbed his hand and flipped him over her shoulder, rocketing upwards immediately after and jetting over to drop down neatly in front of both father and son. Han Solo slumped over a little bit, then recovered. Jacen moved up to stand by him with a look of defiant and protective belligerence. The family resemblence was distinct. It struck Syra with a feeling of acute jealousy and sadness. If her father had been here...  
  
He wasn't. There was only her. "We'll talk," she said. "On the ship. Let's go." She wasn't about to tell the crowd of low-lifes that had gathered any more information than Dengar had already blurted. She was sure he hadn't gotten all the bugs.  
  
In a fit of pique, she rocketed upwards and flew back to the ship, leaving the Solos to hoof it through hostile (or at least unfriendly) territory by themselves. Screw them, anyway. She was a Fett, she didn't need the likes of them.  
  
She just needed her father back.  
  
  
  
  
Kamino. He kept saying he'd never come back here, never in a million lifetimes of a million stars. Lately, he kept finding reasons to. It had been many years since the last time, though. The old buildings, he noted with surprise, were still standing. He landed on the old platform, half expecting to see his father's old Firespray there instead.   
  
The doors didn't open nearly as easily as they had the last time; he had to pry them apart, and do a little creative rewiring to get them to open and shut properly again. His feet remembered the way down the halls, to the quarters he had shared with his father all those years ago. He rewired that door too, not really knowing why he was revisiting old ghosts. The doors slid open slowly, and the lights flickered on. The room was even more bare and much smaller than he remembered. Then again, he had been ten years old the last time he'd been here.   
  
Boba Fett took off his helmet and stared into the glass at the stormy seas outside. The rain beat a so-familiar pattern on the glass, the occasional lightning illuminating a reflection that haunted him. The scars were slightly different, but that was all. It really was his father's face that stared back at him from the glass, a haunt that shook him more deeply than he ever wanted to be shaken. It was like coming home again, and it was jarring. He half expected to be staring up at the reflection, from the vantage point of a ten year old boy, to have his reflection in its blue tunic and pale blue vest standing so much shorter in the glass, looking up at his father with that always-serious expression. He almost expected the door to chime, announcing a visit from Taun We or one of the other Kaminoans. He supposed, with the part of his mind that could still think abstractly about things, that this was why he had never brought Cassandra or Kashya or even young Syra down to this planet. He never wanted any of them, no matter how close they were, to see him this young. This vulnerable.  
  
And yet there was still a small part of him that expected to see young Syra pounding down the halls, laughing, being chased by Kashya. Or to see Cassandra doing sword-forms or range practice down in one of the bigger rooms. He expected to see her catching a quick nap on a bench or working on one of her droids. He expected to see Kashya packing a medical kit. He wondered when they had begun to merge their lives with his ghosts.  
  
Probably when he had realized that the responsibilities Jango had accepted when he had requested his 'payment' of the Kaminoans were now his. He had never understood that part about his father, later, after being raised and taught to be a bounty hunter... until coming back to Cenath and seeing Kashya standing there, surrounded by slavers, waiting for her father to rescue her and defending herself so he would be proud when he got there. His daughter. His responsibility.   
  
A responsibility that he had failed. Kashya was dead... and so was Cassandra. Syra was all that he had left. And he felt the emptiness where his daughter and ... he didn't even know how to think of her anymore... he felt the empty space where they had been. And his father.  
  
This wasn't helping. Boba Fett growled, dragged himself out of his introspective grief, and tried to think objectively about what he had seen. These residential quarters looked to be abandoned... in fact, any sections of Tipoca City not directly related to cloning appeared to have been abandoned. There was little enough ship traffic that he had actually managed to land at a point where no one had seen him come in, which meant that the scientists were sequestered here for months on end. Or they had found a way to grow the clones independantly of living contact. That wasn't entirely a pleasant thought. He stepped out into the hallway to investigate further... and froze as he heard a noise. Evidently his arrival hadn't gone as unnoticed as he'd thought.  
  
The blaster fire came ricocheting down the hall, as expected. He ducked and weaved easily in and out of it, with only the slightest creak of aching joints. Maybe, Fett thought ruefully, he was getting to old for this. Fortunately, he seemed to know the passages better than his assailant. What appeared to be a retreat turned into a rout as he grabbed the person by the shoulders, disarmed him, and spun him around to knock him out, hitting him squarely between...  
  
... brown eyes...  
  
...familiar...  
  
... Kashya's.  
  
  
  
  
"Your father?" Han Solo couldn't believe his ears. He'd known that the person in the Mandalorian armor must have had some connection to Fett to possess the armor and weapons, not to mention the kind of reputation that sent Dengar into such a tizzy. But he'd never imagined... Fett? Daughter? Was the man married, too? He tried to picture what a Fett wedding would look like. He could almost feel his brain heating up with the effort. And... just how was this miraculous act accomplished? Han hadn't thought the man would take off his armor for anything, much less... the image sprang into his head of the impossible act of sex while wearing Mandalorian armor. If he'd been inclined to faint, that would have been an ideal time.  
  
"Yes," she said impatiently, "My father." Her back was to both Solos as she programmed in the course on the datacard Dengar had given her, but neither of them thought for a minute that she had let down her guard. Syra thought briefly about adding 'what about it?' but left it at that.  
  
All Jacen could think of was that this must be the week for lost fathers. "Your father..." he blinked slowly.  
  
"Yeah."  
  
"Boba Fett has a kid?" Han Solo repeated, still wanting to make sure that he was getting this right.  
  
"Yes." She sighed, hands slowing on the console. "I am she."  
  
Han couldn't resist. "What, does he have a wife stashed away somewhere too?"  
  
Fire and explosions. A searing vacancy in the Force.  
  
"No."  
  
Jacen frowned. That kind of disturbance in the Force, a sudden flare up of emotions... that was familiar somehow. But he couldn't remember...  
  
"So... what, he found you on some backwater planet and raised you to become the next big bad bounty hunter?" Han continued, trying to make sense of it all. This actually provoked a laugh from the young Fett.  
  
"Something like that."  
  
Jacen and Han looked at each other. The bounty hunter had a daughter. It had never occured to Han, despite marrying Leia, having three wonderful children, and moving on with their lives, that bounty hunters had lives too. That maybe Fett, despite his cold and heartless reputation, despite his relentless pursuits and methodical brutality, had found a place somewhere in his life for a woman, for a child. That he would raise the child to be like him seemed somehow more reasonable than the child's existance in the first place. It was boggling their minds, Han's especially. But at least it explained where she'd gotten the armor.  
  
Syra could feel their confusion roiling in their minds. Inside her helmet, she smiled to herself. They had no idea what they were getting into. Outside the ship, the streaks of light that signified hyperspace settled into a starscape. The watery, storm-wracked planet floated with deceptive serenity before them.   
  
"We're here." 


	7. Chapter Six

Boba Fett stared down at the body of his daughter, thoughts and emotions slamming through his head like pebbles in the tail of a comet.  
  
His daughter, about right age too, if she'd lived. With his dark eyes and her mother's dark hair, the kind lines that had been on her face smoothed out into impassive grimness, a doll's face. He had no idea whether her ability to touch and use the Force remained; at least, he thought she hadn't used it on him. And a quick search of her outfit revealed a conspicuous lack of a lightsaber. Cassandra had made Kashya a lightsaber when she was very young, and insisted that she learn how to use it.   
  
What the hell was going on here?  
  
Part of it, at least, was clear. This was what Pellaeon had meant when he had talked about altered or improved 'product.' Somehow they'd gotten hold of Kashya's DNA and cloned her as well... had they gotten hold of Cassandra too? It must have seemed like an incredible windfall, he thought bitterly. A Fett with the ability to touch and use the Force. With an army like that, they must have thought they could easily take over the galaxy. He had to admit that they might not be far wrong with that. The thought gave him pause.   
  
But where had they gotten the source material to create the clones? Fett didn't dare let himself think that either Cassandra or Kashya might be alive. He didn't know where they could have gotten the source material except from the two women, but how...   
  
Fett shook his head. He just didn't know enough about the processes involved to make an informed opinion, and he wasn't going to do anything productive if he just sat here and speculated.   
  
The woman in question, whatever she was, was still alive. He reasoned that he could get more information out of her alive than dead, pushed back the tiny voice in the back of his head that said he was just leaving her alive out of sentiment, and tied her up. He could leave her in the room he had once shared with Jango Fett while he went and explored a little more, saw a little bit more of what he was getting into. There was definitely something unhinged about all of this.  
  
He was heading through the hallways at a great rate of knots when he saw a familiar ship silhouette out of the corner of his eye. Pausing in his haste, he looked out the window and sighed. Of all the times... annoyance and pride flashed through him at the same time. Annoyance at her timing, at the fact that she had chosen now to track him and try and help... pride that she'd figured it all out and found the resources to follow through. And then he saw the second ship.  
  
Confusion, and then rage clouded his vision. What were THEY doing here?  
  
  
  
  
  
Syra slowly walked down the landing ramp, staring at the floating city. This was too easy, somehow... and yet, wasn't the planet supposed to be abandoned? It was almost as empty as she half-remembered it, but for one ship on a lonely platform a little closer to the ocean. It wasn't her father's ship, but it looked like the sort of Imperial shuttle he would have been assigned (or stolen). She stretched out with her mind and the Force, being careful not to tip Jacen off to what she was doing... she felt her father's comforting presence. And something else... and now she was curious. She reached out a little further, trying to sense who it was that felt so familiar to her.   
  
... oh no...  
  
Her eyes widened, and she almost stumbled as she started walking across the platform. Conscious of the Solos' eyes on her, she didn't fall, but it was a near thing. She gestured for them to stop.   
  
"Wait here."  
  
They looked at each other, confused and suspicious. She didn't bother to wait for a response, but broke into a run as she headed for the door. She would have used her jetpack if she thought that would get her where she needed to go any faster... the problem was, she had no idea where she needed to go. She needed to find her father at least... but she had no idea where in the floating city he was, and even less of an idea how to navigate it.  
  
Then Syra stopped just inside the doorway and would have smacked herself in the forehead if she thought it wouldn't cause herself an injury.   
  
"Dad?" She activated the internal commlink and prayed he had his turned on and recieving.  
  
"Syra... of all the people, why did you have to bring Solo?"   
  
She almost cried with relief. His acerbic tone meant that nothing too terribly bad could have happened to him, that he hadn't been tortured or interrogated or drugged or anything. Granted, his presence in the Force was as strong as ever... but she liked to have that little extra bit of confirmation.  
  
"Dad... where are you? I need to talk to you..." she swallowed the tears out of her voice. "Now. It's really important."  
  
There was a long silence. "Turn right, go down the hallway about 45 metres, take the left fork, follow it to the outermost hallway, and meet me ... five doors down." He seemed to have the exact layout of the building in his head. She didn't stop to wonder why. "You did good, Syra..."   
  
She smiled, running again. It was good to hear him say that.  
  
It didn't take long to get to the room he was indicating. It looked like living quarters, and she stood outside the door for a minute or so trying to figure out how to get in before the doors wooshed open and she saw her father standing there, armored and helmeted as usual. She stepped inside.  
  
"Is it...?" she started to ask, reaching up to take off her helmet.  
  
"Go ahead..." He took his own helmet off, and made a 'whuff' noise as she yanked hers off and launched herself at him.   
  
"Dad... It's Maman..." she sniffled. It was all coming apart now, and everything in the last few days was catching up with her. She was acutely aware that she was only fifteen. It all seemed so overwhelming, especially... how was she going to tell him?  
  
Boba Fett stood quite still for a moment. Finally he recovered enough to put gentle hands on her shoulders. "Slow down, Syra..." he said carefully, taking several deep breaths. "What happened?"  
  
She swallowed back the tears, trying to breathe. "It's Maman... I don't know how... I don't know what happened. But Maman... and Kashya. I think they're here... on this station. Somehow..."  
  
The bounty hunter took a deep, ragged breath. If the creature tied and locked in the small closet really was a clone of his eldest daughter, that would explain why the youngest was sobbing in his arms now. What would cloning do to a person's Force powers, to their signature in the Force, he wondered? He didn't know... he had no basis on which to form a theory. As he worked out what to do he hugged Syra tighter, trying not to think about the implications of everything that had happened in the last day or two.  
  
"Syra..." he said finally, stepping back. Almost in imitation, Syra squared her shoulders and straightened up, her face mirroring what he suddenly recognized as his own calm, impassive expression. "They've created clones. Of Cassandra and Kashya." Her face paled, but her eyes flashed anger. "How they managed it, I don't know. But we need to find out how, and stop it."  
  
She nodded, resolute. "They'd've had to had some kind of source material to clone everyone from... and they'd probably keep it close to the facilities where they do the actual cloning."   
  
He almost smiled. "I remember where they are. Let's go."  
  
She nodded. They left.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
It took her father a couple tries before they found the right hallway, but in a very short span of time they were there. The cloning facilities were, mercifully, free of clones... but not doctors. They had to shoot down five of them. Syra didn't let herself think about what she was doing, telling herself over and over again that it was herself or them. Her family or them. Life or death. Shoot or die. It worked, a little.   
  
There was a bank of doors all along one side of the lab, leading to what her father said were the storage facilities. It was there that the scientists would be keeping whatever genetic material they had based the clones off of. Syra and Boba had exchanged glances at that.   
  
"I can't feel anything in those rooms," she murmured through the commlink. "It's like they're blank spots in the Force."  
  
Boba nodded. He knew of any number of creatures or phenomena that could achieve that effect. He wasn't sure what it meant, though. Without any further discussion, they opened up the first two doors and went in.  
  
It took a second for Syra to get used to the overlaying blue-tinted light of her visor. There was no natural light in the room, so she had to use the artificial eyes built into her helmet. It took her a while to realize what she was seeing, because of that. And then it took her another little while to realize what that meant, because she hadn't been near an industrial facility in her life. Had she brought them with her, the Solos would have recognized it. But they were back with the ship. The low humming of the life monitors soothed her rattled nerves, kept her from going insane as she slowly pieced together what was going on.  
  
If she'd been able to touch the Force, she realized suddenly, she'd know what was going on the second she landed on the station. And then, as something moved in the corner above her head, she realized why the whole room seemed blank to her. The ysalimiri died quickly, but the laser she'd fired blinded her temporarily. She shook her head until the stars in her vision went away. Until she could see the huge slab of a panel of... something... in front of her. And then she felt it.   
  
And then she understood.  
  
Syra dived for the wall, frantically pushing buttons and praying for the Force to guide her, nearly yelling in fright as the carbonite block that had once been her sister slammed to the ground, regurgitating the crumpled form of Kashya Fett. 


	8. Chapter Seven

Boba Fett stared up at the body of the woman he had thought long dead. She still looked dead, for that matter... or at least, not alive. She looked like a statue, beautiful and still, carved in some forgotten metal. But the readings on the side of the carbonite panel told him that she was very much alive, if frozen in time. Alive, and had been for the past nine years.   
  
He didn't waste time with asking the air why, if she was alive, why Syra hadn't been able to sense her. He, of all people, knew that there were many ways to block a person from the Force. He'd employed several of them when he had been hunting down the Jedi. He understood why they'd kept her shielded from the Force... she could have figured out a way to escape if she'd had that one link. He understood why they'd frozen her in carbonite... in case they needed any more of the source of genetic material. He understood it all, even if they didn't understand that he was going to kill every last one of them for it. Whoever 'they' were.   
  
But that didn't matter, right now. Boba Fett shook himself out of his daze, stepped over to the side and keyed in the release sequence. Slowly, he dialed the temperature back up, keyed the carbonite storage block to release its long-held contents.   
  
He didn't hold his breath that she'd still be alive... or even that she'd live through the first five minutes. Han Solo had had enough problems when the princess had gotten him out after a few mere months in carbonite hibernation. She had been in the carbonite for over nine years. It had kept her body from atrophying, but it would have left her weak... maybe too weak to stay alive once the preservation qualities of the carbonite had been taken away. But he had to try. Besides, it was her, after all.  
  
If anyone could survive it, Cassandra could.  
  
As he waited for the sequence to complete he became aware of a buzzing in his ear. With concentration, it clarified. "...miri..." his daughter was saying.  
  
"What? Slow down..."  
  
"Shoot the ysalimiri."  
  
Of course. The forest-dwelling creatures that projected a bubble of... nega-Force, or whatever it was. He looked up towards the ceiling; they dwelled in the canopy when they were natural-born, they'd be in the ceiling now. He picked off one, two, three... by the time the sixth one was gone, Cassandra was starting to crumple to the floor. He caught her as she fell, gasping for air.  
  
"Relax..." he found himself murmuring as she flopped around wildly, blind eyes staring, chest heaving as she tried to draw breath to scream. He hoped she could at least hear him. "Just relax. You're free of the carbonite."  
  
She could hear him. She did relax, going almost entirely limp in his arms. Her fingers twitched a little with the need to push herself up, but she didnt' have the strength to do much more than lie there and shake. "You have hibernation sickness..." he added finally, although possibly unnecessarily."  
  
Her eyes widened, looking around. Somehow she managed the energy to reach up and take hold of his upper arm, pulling herself upright. Her other hand crawled up her body till her fingertips brushed her eyes as she opened and closed them, clearly alarmed at her lack of sight. "It's okay..." he said, a little too quickly. "Your eyesight will come back. With time."  
  
Cassandra struggled to stand up, to stand away from him, but couldn't manage it. She didn't recognize him, he thought with dismay. Then, as she struggled to her knees (healing faster than he would have thought possible) he realized why. All her energy was now bent on healing herself. She didn't have the strength to see with the Force, to see who was rescuing her. "Wuh..." she started, licking her lips. "Wuh... where..."  
  
"We're on Kamino..." he said slowly. "The cloning facilities at Tipoca City."  
  
Her eyes widened; she knew what that meant. She backed away even further from him, and would have fallen if he hadn't lunged forward and caught her in time. She pulled away, pushing against him with her hands flat on his chestplate. "Wuh... Who..." her hands fumbled upwards, even as she tried to pull out of his grasp. "Who are..." Her fingers touched his helmet, and stopped. More slowly, more carefully, they traced the smooth lines and ridges of his helmet. Then, still slowly, she smiled.  
  
He smiled back, weary, ducking his head a little as she tugged off his helmet and began gently running her fingertips over his face, seeing with her hands. Her eyes were blinking, adjusting slowly. She was healing more rapidly than he would ever have thought anyone could, from years of hibernation and carbon-freezing.   
  
"Can you walk?" he asked finally, recovering his scattered wits. "We have to leave. And then I have to destroy this place."  
  
She nodded, working her mouth slowly, making sure she could speak at least a little. "Think suh... so."  
  
Fett nodded, putting his helmet back on and releasing her just long enough to make sure he could secure his weapons. She reached out till she could feel a wall and put her hand on it, slowly pulling herself to her feet. He was a little dismayed at how weak she seemed to be, then annoyed at himself for assuming she could just get up and walk out of there in such a cavalier fashion. He made sure he could reach his weapons, then reached out and scooped her up into his arms.  
  
She was incredibly light.  
  
The door opened easily, revealing the still-armored Syra standing in the hallway with Kashya leaning heavily on her arm. They exchanged a look, a nod, and started walking slowly towards Fett's ship. Cassandra lifted her head as they exited the lab.  
  
"Syra..." she said it almost as though she were tasting the air with the word. Syra's expression was hidden behind her helmet, but Fett would have placed a year's bounties on her smiling fit to split her face.  
  
"Lightsabers..." Kashya said then, and Cassandra looked up and nodded.   
  
"Our lightsabers..." her voice was still a little slurred, but getting stronger. She looked like she was getting stronger by the minute. Kashya wasn't recovering nearly as quickly, but at least Cassandra... she slid out of his arms within a few minutes and was slowly walking on her own. "In a storage... facility..."  
  
Syra was gaping at her mother. "How are you..." she asked, astonishment plain even through the distortion of the helmet.   
  
Cassandra glanced at Boba Fett, didn't respond.  
  
"Questions later," he said gruffly. "Now, we ...."  
  
"MOVE!" Cassandra dragged Fett to one side, even as Syra threw herself to the other side and dragged her sister with her. Force lightning sizzled the air between them. The second blast scorched Cassandra in the forearm as she raised her hand and sent the detritus of the labs flying to intercept the crackling electricity.  
  
"Maman?!" Syra yelped.  
  
"It's okay, Syra..." Cassandra said calmly, ignoring her burnt arm. She didn't even have to look around; Fett lunged across the ground behind her even as she stood, sending more debris to intercept the purple lightning. Blaster fire sounded, echoing down the hallway. After a few minutes there was silence again, and two robed figures at the end of the hall with smoking holes in their foreheads.  
  
"Don't look," Cassandra warned, almost falling to her knees. Boba Fett caught her by one arm and held her till she could stand on her own again. Her face was gray and slightly damp with sweat. "You don't want to look. Trust me..."  
  
"How did you know...?" Boba Fett murmured into her ear. "You're still blind... aren't you?"  
  
She smiled grimly, giving them all time to recover enough to walk. "They were attacking us through the Force. I could feel it... respond to it. Besides," she continued with the arrogance of long habit, "I'm better than they are."  
  
Beneath his helmet, the bounty hunter smiled.   
  
"Let's go..." he said finally, when it looked like Kashya could walk almost on her own. They moved down the hallway a little further while he tried to remember where in area they would have kept the lightsabers. Probably in the weapons lockers for the clones, he thought with dismay, which was all the way on the other side of...  
  
But... no. They wouldn't have had the tools or the ability to make more lightsabers. They had to be somewhere safe, somewhere secret where most people wouldn't get their hands on them. And that meant...  
  
"Wait here..." he said brusquely, and took off. Cassandra blinked and stared after him in confusion as his footsteps disappeared down the hallway.   
  
"Syra, did he get shot in the helmet a few too many times or something?" Kashya choked out, with a harsh and stuttering laugh. Cassandra chuckled, her voice also rusty.  
  
"He says he thought of some place where they might have kept the... oh! He found them..." Syra's voice was tinny and distorted through the helmet, but the youth and enthusiasm carried through to her mother, who smiled.   
  
"Good," she said, and started to say something else, except that Syra stepped back and brought her lightsaber up from her belt, igniting it with the familiar snap-hiss. "Syra...?"  
  
"It's okay, Maman..." she said, grinning. At least there was something she could surprise her mother with. "They've been training me at the Jedi Academy."  
  
Boba Fett arrived just in time to hear Cassandra's uncharacteristically startled "WHAT?!"  
  
"We've got to move..." he watched Cassandra blink her eyes and shake her head, forcing her vision into focus. "Are you going to be all right?"   
  
She nodded. "Eventually this is going to take its toll, but I'll be all right till we can make it to the ships. Then I'll probably sleep for a week," she said ruefully. He tossed her the lightsaber she'd constructed for herself, and she caught and ignited it easily. The gold blade split the air, complimenting Syra's blue.   
  
He hated to do it. But he had to. "There's one more thing you're going to have to do before we take off," he said slowly. All three females looked at him. "We can't let the clones live... we can't afford to let this continue. And after we broke in here, they're going to know that someone knows about their operation. I was going to set the city's self-destruct and explode the room, but... can you set the self-destruct through the Force?" Ordinarily he wouldn't have asked any Force user to help him in any way... but this was different. And he knew her abilities, knew that if she had the strength, she'd have the knowledge to do it.  
  
Cassandra took a deep breath as both her daughters looked at her. "I think so..." she said slowly. "But in that case, there's two things we have to do before we take off... fortunately they're both on the way."  
  
Fett stared at her, and she stared back, gold eyes finally focused on his face (well, helmet) but impassive and carefully blank. "All right..." he said slowly, trusting her judgement. "Syra, get your sister. We're leaving."  
  
Cassandra was already starting to walk ahead, her fingertips trailing electricity along the walls as she tapped into the central city computer. It was her own little personal touch of the Force.. she had a way with computers, speaking to them, working with them. Boba Fett didn't understand it. He hadn't even realized it existed until she had escaped from his ship, and then he had tracked her down and finally asked her how she'd done it. It seemed to be a rare gift among the Jedi. Whatever it was, he'd been glad of it in the past and he was doubly glad of it now. As he helped Syra and Kashya make their cautious way through the hallway, he saw clone guards out of the corner of his eye in the other corridors. At first they were mobilizing, and then they seemed to stop and go back to their posts.  
  
"Cassandra...?" he made the one word a question.  
  
"I'm suppressing the alarms, sending fake comm messages, telling them it's just a malfunction."  
  
Well, that explained that. He'd suspected something of the sort. But... "Where are we going?"  
  
"To the ships... I'm sending them to meet us."  
  
Them?  
  
"Cassandra..." his tone darkened... this wasn't how he liked things... but she interrupted.  
  
"Trust me... besides, we can't leave them here. You'll understand when you see..." She stopped dead in her tracks, dropping her hand from the wall as the traces of electricity died. Fett opened his mouth to say something annoyed and then stopped, staring where she was looking. Suddenly he did understand, as he stared down at the two, tiny, blue-clad forms that could have been twins if he hadn't known better, if he hadn't seen those faces in a mirror many decades ago.  
  
"They're coming with us," Cassandra said firmly.  
  
He couldn't find the words to disagree with her. The image of a small boy on orange arena sands, an empty helmet pressed to his forehead, was too strong to deny. 


	9. Chapter Eight

Author's note: The last few chapters of this story will probably get refined at some point in the near future. But I want to get this out before I procrastinate it into oblivion.  
  
  
If Han Solo had had a problem with the thought of Boba Fett having a daughter or some other sort of female protege, this was just too much for his mind to handle. The station exploding around him there was not one, not two, but four armored figures walking out of the flames. Four. Two of them carried boys who couldn't be more than eight or ten years old in their arms. He felt his jaw drop and his brain start to shut down. A family of Fetts. And he'd thought he'd seen all the universe had to throw at him. Somewhere in the back of his mind it registered that they were speaking. He almost missed the words, as few of them as there were.  
  
"Let's go."  
  
Oh. Okay. Those words, even from a Fett, he could deal with. Especially as they were standing on a landing platform attatched to a station that seemed to be busily engaged in blowing up. Somehow, according to prearranged instructions maybe, the group of Mandalorian armored felons separated. One took the hand of the other boy (twins?) and ran for the Falcon. The other two split themselves between the remaining two ships that had landed there a few seconds earlier. It briefly occured to Han that maybe helmet commlinks to the ship weren't such a bad idea after all. Then they were running up the gangplank and taking off.  
  
"So," Han asked, flipping open the comm and glancing skeptically at his son. "What exactly did you need us for?" He had a direct channel to the other Fett's ship, but wasn't prepared to talk to Boba Fett right at the moment.  
  
Jacen shrugged.  
  
"The Imperials," she said succinctly. Han thought he detected a note of smug glee in her tone.  
  
"The WHAT?"  
  
The Fetts started to roar off. Solo opened his mouth to ask why they didn't just jump to hyperspace when an Interdictor Cruiser's shadow started to loom directly on top of him. That made more sense. He shook off his dazedness and started hitting the throttle as the belly of the Cruiser disgorged a squadron of Tie Fighters.  
  
"Dad..." Jacen said, strapping himself in next to Han. "Do you have any idea what's going on?"  
  
Han looked sideways at his son before juking to the left to avoid being strafed by laser fire. "I was going to ask you the same thing," he muttered, rolling his eyes at the squadron. "Wish you'd thought to recruit Wedge in on this little crazy mission of yours. Get the guns."  
  
Jacen nodded and scurried off for the gunner ports. Han sighed. This wasn't going to be easy.   
  
Laser fire started spraying from the starboard gunner port, and Han silently blessed the foresight that had inspired teaching his son to shoot these things. Jaina would have learned whether her parents wanted to or not, but Jacen had had to be nudged. It wasn't until the port guns started firing, though, that he realized there was someone else in there.  
  
"Jacen!" he yelled, still evading like a maniac. "What's going on up there."  
  
"You needed an extra gun," came the comm-distorted voice, and Han's hands actually froze on the controls for a second. Not Boba, not the impossibly Fett-like Syra, but one of the other Mandalorians. Or whatever they were. Was she also laying claim to the Fett name and reputation? Scary thought.   
  
"Thanks." Han said, and cut off the comm before the "I think." could make its way across the lines.  
  
She must have been coordinating with the other two Fetts. The laser fire from his ship and the fire from the other two ships was too well timed and too precise for anything else to be happening. They made shorter work of the TIE fighters than he could have alone; they almost finished them off quicker than even Rogue Squadron could. Han flipped through, trying to catch them in comm traffic. It didn't work.  
  
"We're safe, for now." Han jumped in his seat. He hadn't heard the armored figure approach. "Plot a course to the planet you came from. We'll leave you there."  
  
He almost wanted to make this armored figure promise that Boba Fett would leave him alone no matter what else happened after this. He didn't. "Are you sure they won't follow us?"  
  
"They won't."  
  
The armored figure left. Han sat there for a few seconds, almost automatically plotting in the fastest course to Cenath that he could figure out on such short notice. Jacen poked his head in a couple times, but withdrew at Han's pensive and frustrated look.   
  
This just didn't make sense. What the hell was going on? Why was an Imperial force big enough to drop in an Interdictor Cruiser at no notice interested in a family of Fetts? Why was there a family of Fetts in the first place? Why were there children involved in this family of Fetts, much less twin boys? He started asking himself the questions out loud, not noticing. Where had all the armor come from? Why was Boba Fett even still alive after the Sarlaac and Nar Shadda and everything else the man had been through? Why was he even with the family of Fetts, given his almost rabid penchant for solo-work and backstabbing his supposed partners?  
  
Why was he talking to himself?  
  
Han stood and punched in the coordinates, remembering at the last second to feed them to the other two ships before they all jumped. He didn't bother to give a count, but they jumped with him anyway. Probably the preternatural Fett instincts. Or maybe the other one was behind him again... he whipped around. Dammit! This was getting to be too much.  
  
He stormed off into what passed for the rec room. Maybe Jacen could shed some light on this, he was the one who had started this errant venture, after all. And then he stopped in the hallway, leaned against one of the walls, and stared.   
  
Maybe not.  
  
  
  
  
  
Cassandra, her face hidden behind her scrounged-up helmet, smirked. This was giving her smug satisfaction on so many levels. For one thing, it wasn't every day that a former Jedi reject got to tutor a current Jedi student on lightsaber technique. But then again, these weren't exactly Jedi. A school with one teacher, and he had probably been a half-assed student at best, given Jacen's lightsaber skills. And he wasn't a bad student. But still.  
  
She led him through one of the easier drills again, effortlessly blocking the stings from the remote druids. In one corner, curled up on the benches behind the holo-chess table, the 'twins' were sleeping. Jacen followed her movements, managing to get most of them this time. He was also, she sensed through the Force, getting more of an awareness of his surroundings. Good. He wasn't going to be able to match her or even Kashya anytime soon, but he might actually survive his childhood at this rate. If she wasn't mistaken, the fact that he was a Solo and a Jedi would make him a tempting target for more than just the Imperials. It was the same sort of thing that made herself and Kashya such tempting targets...  
  
She pushed the thought out of her mind.  
  
Spikes of disbelief interrupted both her and Jacen's concentration. She didn't have to turn to see Han Solo gaping at both of them with his jaw dropped, and resisted the urge to ask, "What, never seen a Fett with a lightsaber before?" Jacen did turn, and looked very guilty doing so.  
  
"Hey, Dad," he said.   
  
"Hey, son." He said it with almost exaggerated calm. As though his son was trained by someone connected to his mortal enemy all the time. Cassandra was nearly hyperventilating with suppressed laughter.   
  
"Practice going good?"   
  
"Pretty good. I think."  
  
Tears were streaming down her cheeks. She was suddenly very glad of the helmet.  
  
"We'll be coming out of hyperspace in another hour. You'd probably better wrap it up soon."  
  
"Okay, Dad."   
  
Quiet comments came in through the helmet comm from her daughters. She hushed them until the Solos were done with their conversation. There was a sort of uncomfortable pause.  
  
"Keep up the good work." He didn't say 'I guess,' though it sounded like he should have.   
  
"Sure, Dad."  
  
Silence. Han Solo finally turned and left.  
  
Cassandra waited until both father and son were out of the room before falling over in helpless fits of giggles. It took her several minutes before she was coherent enough to tell anyone what had happened. She only stopped laughing when the 'twins' woke up, wanting to know what was going on. That sobered her up quite a bit. She hadn't the faintest idea what to tell them, and they hadn't even seen Boba Fett. This was going to be quite the adventure.  
  
  
  
  
  
Syra held her breath as her mother and the two clone-kids descended out of the Falcon... the twins, she reminded herself. She was going to have to get used to that. At least they weren't Force-sensitive, and couldn't tell how unnerved she was by the whole thing. At least they hadn't found clones of Kashya and ... she didn't want to think about it. At least they were kids, and not full grown... Syra shook her head. Stop thinking about it.   
  
Her parents were talking quietly to each other, always without looking like they were talking. She could hear their voices over the comm, though, and they didn't sound too worried. Her father sounded like he was tense about something, which was about par for the course. Mother sounded like she was trying to be soothing without being obvious about it. Syra had faint but persistent memories of conversations like this, during the brief times when she saw her father... mother trying to keep him from going after someone or something without alerting him to the fact that she was manipulating him. She'd always thought her mother was rather good at it, but now that she was actually listening...  
  
Syra... she heard inside her mind. It's not nice to eavesdrop.  
  
Sorry, Mom.  
  
Syra smiled. It was good to have her whole family back again.  
  
Her father half-supported, half-dragged Kashya towards the house. From what Syra could tell, she and mother would both need about two weeks of Force-coma, her own private name for the Jedi healing trance. Her mother was herding the 'twins' in, and Syra briefly hoped she wouldn't be asked to take care of them too much. They set off all kinds of alarm bells in her mind, little warning sirens that said 'things should not be like this.' She wondered why anyone would make clones in the first place. And then she felt emotions mirroring her own, radiating from behind her. She turned.  
  
Mom... could you give us a couple minutes alone?  
  
I'll keep your father away, her mother's weary but amused voice spoke back in her mind. Syra, too, smiled.   
  
Thanks.  
  
Out loud, she said. "Give us a few minutes, Solo." It felt odd to be ordering around Jacen's father like that, when she'd been so polite and nice to him before. But he'd never understand that kind of sentiment coming from a Fett. Maybe someday... and then she pushed the thought out of her mind. Her father would never allow it.  
  
Jacen stood there and fidgeted from one foot to the other, looking nervous. Syra wanted to laugh, to cry, to hug him all at the same time. Most of all, she wanted to tell him what was going on.   
  
Why not? Her mother's voice echoed in her mind.  
  
It's not nice to eavesdrop, mother.  
  
I'm not eavesdropping, she replied placidly. You're projecting. Just tell the boy, Syra. He can keep a secret.   
  
Syra took a deep breath. Her father was going to kill her for this.  
  
"We had a bargain, young Solo," she said, in a flat a tone as she could manage. Yeah, her father was going to kill her for this, and maybe Jacen too, and maybe even HIS father. But this was going to be so much fun... "Your friend for Boba Fett."  
  
"Yeah..." Jacen said, guardedly. She could feel his confusion, his curiosity as to where this was going, and his mistrust of anyone under the Mandalorian helmet. A few more seconds. She stepped forward.   
  
"I would be remiss in letting you go without fulfilling my part of the bargain." She'd heard her father say it once. Coming out of the helmet speakers, it did sound damn impressive.   
  
Jacen gulped.  
  
Syra took off her helmet.  
  
Jacen stared.  
  
Syra grinned. This was even more fun with Han Solo sneaking a glance out of the cockpit window. She could almost hear him smacking his head on the ceiling and swearing in astonishment. Jacen just stood there like one o'clock half-struck. She leaned forward and kissed him on the cheek, the crowning gesture in her pageant of hidden identities. It was almost a pity that she wouldn't be going back to the Jedi academy. The looks on all their faces...  
  
"Bargain kept," she said, trying to keep her amusement to a slight smirk. "Have fun at the Academy." 


End file.
